Smallwood, Robert (editor) (2005). Players of Shakespeare 5: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, David Tennant on playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, pp. 113–130. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521676983
DAVID TENNANT
DAVID TENNANT played Romeo in Michael Boyd's production of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the summer season of 2000, and later at the Barbican Theatre. His other roles in that season were Antipholus of Syracuse, and Jack Absolute in The Rivals. Earlier roles for the RSC were Touchstone, Jack Lane in The Herbal Bed, and Hamilton in The General from America. His other stage work includes a wide range of classical and modern roles at the Manchester Royal Exchange (where he played Edgar in King Lear), the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, and in London, at the Donmar, the Almeida and the National Theatre. He has worked extensively on radio and television and among his films are LA Without a Map and The Last September. His essay on his performance of Touchstone in the RSC's 1996 production of As You Like It was published in Players of Shakespeare 4.
The thing about Romeo and Juliet is that everyone seems to think they know what it's about. You don't have to talk about it for long before people start saying things like 'the greatest love story ever told' and spouting famous lines. ('Wherefore art thou Romeo' has to be one of the most overused and most misunderstood quotations in the English-speaking world.) When I found out that I was going to be playing Romeo for the Royal Shakespeare Company I was at first thrilled, then nervous, and then rather snowed under with unsolicited opinion: 'O, it's a wonderful part'; 'terribly difficult'; 'such beautiful poetry'; 'O, he's so wet'; 'he's so wonderfully romantic'; 'Why on earth do you want to play Romeo? Mercutio is the only part to play'; 'of course Romeo is always upstaged by Juliet'; 'it's the best of Shakespeare'; 'it's absolutely Shakespeare's worst play' - and so on, and on, until it soon became evident that to attempt such a part in such a play might be at best ill-advised and at worst total and utter madness. It was certainly clear that I couldn't hope to please all of the people all of the time and that even pleasing some of the people some of the time was going to be pretty tricky.
However, I had always wanted to play Romeo. I thought it was a great part full of very recognizable emotions and motivations, with a vibrant youthful energy and a sense of poetry with which anyone who has ever been a self-dramatizing adolescent can identify. It is suffused with the robust certainty and cynicism of youth, but crowned with a winning and rather beautiful open-heartedness. And it's a great story brilliantly told, full of passion, wit, politics, intrigue, life and death, and topped off with lashings of sex and violence. And we had a great director at the helm in the shape of Michael Boyd, whose work I had been thrilled by for years at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow and more recently at the RSC itself. His productions had always seemed to me to have the power to make the theatre a truly magical place where things happen that could only happen in a theatre, so that theatre isn't the poor relation of the feature-film but a genuine living art form specific to itself and nothing else. I'd always been desperately keen to work with Michael and to do it with this play was a dream come true.
And Juliet was to be played by Alexandra Gilbreath whom I had met several times and knew would be great to work with, as well as having seen her be very brilliant as Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac and as Hermione in The Winter's Tale. So the whole package was shaping up rather irresistibly.
And I was running out of time. There is no explicit reference in the text to how old Romeo is, but he is, undeniably, a young man. I didn't have very many years left. I'd always said to myself that it was a part I would have to do before my thirtieth birthday or not at all. Actors older than that have played the part, of course, and I don't doubt that they've done it very well, but I wanted to set myself a deadline. (There are, after all, few more tragic sights than a balding, middle-aged actor, corsetting in his paunch and inelegantly bounding across the stage as an ageing juvenile!) So, at twenty-eight (I would be twenty-nine before the show opened) it was now or never.
And I suppose that playing Romeo had always represented to me the first rung on a ladder that every great classical actor had climbed before ascending to Hamlet, Iago, Macbeth, and so on, finally culminating in a great, definitive King Lear before toppling over and retiring to an old actors' home and telling ribald anecdotes into a great, plummy old age. Not that I am, for a second, categorizing myself as a 'great classical actor', or even aspiring to such a term, but the opportunity to follow a path through these famous parts in the wake of actors like Irving, Olivier, Gielgud and others seemed thrilling, and something that, ever since drama school, I'd dreamed of doing. This is the sort of egocentric thought-process that is not entirely helpful to an actor when it comes to actually approaching a role, and I'm not particularly proud to admit to it now, but I can't deny that it was a part (only a relatively small part, but an important one nevertheless) of what made me say yes to the RSC and to begin to find my own way through the sea of received notions of what the part meant to everyone who was so keen to give me their opinion.
As the play was to be part of the RSC's 2000 season, I would be involved in more than one production, so I was duly signed up to play Jack Absolute in Sheridan's The Rivals and Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors, as well as Romeo. Romeo and Juliet wouldn't even start rehearsals until the other two plays were up and running, which meant that I was thrown into the first rehearsal day on Romeo only a day or two after my second opening night of the season. This meant that I had had little time to brood over the script before we started. I had been reading the play, of course, and I had made a few observations and suggestions for myself, but I came to the initial readthrough relatively open-minded as to how I was going to approach the play and the part.
On the first day Michael Boyd spoke about his own initial impressions and ideas. He talked about the enormous amount of baggage this play seems to bring with it, and his desire that we should shed it all as soon as possible. He said that he'd been surprised, when rereading the play, how unsentimental and muscular it was, and he noted how full of sexual innuendo and darkness it was too. He was interested to find that it was a play about generation, and that the story of the parents was not to be forgotten in the story about their children. He talked about how he wanted to approach the play simply and truthfully, and he introduced us to the set design that he had been working on with designer Tom Piper.
It was a non-specific design, basically two curving walls, facing each other, that could represent different things throughout the evening - whether they were the orchard walls that Romeo climbs, the wall under Juliet's balcony, or, more symbolically, simply a representation of the two families, ever present and immovably solid. Costumes were to be vaguely Elizabethan, without any attempt to be pedantically specific. Statements about generations could be made through the costumes, so that the old world-order of the ageing Prince Escalus would be represented in full doublet and hose, while I, along with Benvolio, Mercutio and the other young men, would look more modern, using shapes and fabrics from contemporary designers. Anachronisms were not to be shied away from if they helped to tell the story.
So, with the world of the production taking shape, I had to start figuring out who Romeo is and how he fits into this society. He's the heir to the Montague fortune - a not-inconsiderable position either socially or politically - but he seems altogether without interest in the family's conflict and much more concerned with his own inner turmoil:
O me, what fray was here?
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.
Here [i.e., in my heart]'s much to do with hate, but more with love.
(I.i.173-5)
Before his first entrance we learn that Romeo has been seen wandering gloomily through the woods at dawn and holing himself up in his room. He's become distant from his parents - unlike the Capulets, the parent/child dynamic in the Montague household is barely touched on in the play. There doesn't appear to be any antagonism between Romeo and his parents, just a lack of any communication at all, despite Mr and Mrs Montague's obvious concern for their son. It suggests to me that Romeo finds his 'family' elsewhere. Certainly the parental confidant in his life seems to have become the friar (but we learn more of that later on) and it is Benvolio who is employed to find out what's wrong. Central to this first Romeo scene is his relationship with Benvolio. Anthony Howell (playing Benvolio) and I were keen that the two should enjoy a familiar, relaxed relationship. We have just been shown that Benvolio has a trusting relationship with Romeo's parents and, since Benvolio's parents are never referred to, we began to assume that they had been brought up together, so that, although only cousins, they would interact like brothers. (And as Anthony and I were playing identical twins in The Comedy of Errors, it seemed churlish not to make the most of any 'familial' similarities.) Having someone who knows Romeo so well helps, I think, to mitigate the worst of his excesses. It struck me that Romeo's first entrance doesn't necessarily help to endear him to an audience, but Benvolio's presence provides an affectionate cynicism which allows the audience, and perhaps even Romeo himself, to see the extremity of his self-indulgence.
When we first see him, Romeo is in the throes of a huge and unrequited crush on a character we never even get to meet; not the 'Juliet' that the play's title has led us to expect him to be pining for, but some girl called Rosaline, who appears to have taken a vow of celibacy rather than reciprocate his advances. Michael encouraged me to think of Rosaline as a novice nun - the ultimate sexual lost cause for Romeo to be mooning after. And this, it seems to me, is part of it: Rosaline's very remoteness and inaccessibility are part of her appeal to the self-aware, emotionally immature and indulgent Romeo. A reciprocated love (such as he later enjoys with Juliet) would not grant him the opportunity to bemoan his own lot, in that peculiarly adolescent way:
She hath forsworn to love; and in that vow
Do I live dead that live to tell it now.
(I.i.223-4)
It certainly allows him to cock a superior snook at Benvolio - a kind of 'you who have never loved couldn't hope to empathize with the transcendental pain that I am feeling to a degree that no other human being alive or dead could ever equal'. I'm not suggesting that Romeo is lying to himself, or anyone else, about how he's feeling, but I wanted to suggest that some part of him is enjoying his own drama. (That also allows you somewhere to go later when he experiences a very visceral passion and a very real drama which he can have neither time nor inclination to enjoy or indulge in.) It was a difficult balance to strike: on the one hand I didn't want to patronize the character by portraying someone who doesn't know himself- though in a way he doesn't (yet) - but at the same time I wanted to tell the story of a disaffected youth at odds with his predicament, his environment, and himself and full of the 'nobodyunderstands- me' ire of adolescence. In discussion with Tom Piper, the designer, it was decided that he would dress himself in black - a selfconscious Hamlet, in mourning for his life. He is therefore in a state of flux, full of unfulfilled passion and directionless purpose - ripe for a journey and looking for exactly the sort of experience that he is about to stumble upon. 'The readiness is all' - and without it there could be no inevitability about what happens and no journey for the character. So if Benvolio is the familiar harbour where Romeo begins his journey, and Juliet is the northern star which guides him forward, Mercutio is the storm that tries to blow him off course and, in our production at least, goes all out to sink him.
Mercutio is a close friend of Romeo and Benvolio, but whilst he is undeniably fun to be around and the life and soul of the party, he is a 'high maintenance' personality, and when we first meet him the strain in his relationship with Romeo is beginning to tell. It certainly seems from the text of the play that Mercutio doesn't entirely applaud Romeo's interest in girls. He bombards Romeo with criticism and lewd innuendo about his mooning after Rosaline. Adrian Schiller (playing Mercutio) felt sure that this endless vitriol must be based on something more than lockerroom horseplay and that the character's fury must stem from a feeling, however subconscious, of sexual jealousy and betrayal. We had no trouble finding this in the playing of the scenes. The further Romeo moves away from his 'childhood' friends into the grown-up world of heterosexual desire, the more Mercutio rages and the less Romeo is affected by him. Whether Mercutio himself is aware of his crush on Romeo, we chose to play that Benvolio and Romeo are, so that when Mercutio pushed me over and mounted me during the climax of his Queen Mab speech -
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
This is she - (I.iv.92-5)
Romeo's interruption ('Peace, peace, Mercutio! / Thou talkest of nothing') is a rejection of his cynicism and innuendo as well as a rejection of his advances. Romeo has already set off in a direction that can't include his friend if he is going to demand his complete attention. The playing of this unspoken sexual tension helped us to unlock some of the more opaque dialogue elsewhere in the play. The scene (II.iv) between the three lads in the midday heat - the morning after the party following which Romeo has (Mercutio presumes) spent the night with Rosaline - contains one of those Shakespearian interchanges that can make actors despair: an exchange of pun-laden witticism crammed full of Elizabethan references that make the pages of the play-text groan with footnotes. The challenge is always to make a modern audience who, on the whole, enjoy a relatively slim appreciation of the finer points of sixteenth-century double entendre, feel that they can follow your argument. When Romeo and Mercutio set off on their battle of wits (a battle, incidentally, that they both seem to enjoy and revel in - an interest ing
clue to why they have found each other as friends and something that Adrian and I were keen to show, for there is little to mourn in the breakdown of a friendship if you have no idea why they were friends in the first place, and Shakespeare's economy of storytelling offers these clues sparingly enough), it's difficult to follow the thread of what they are saying even on the printed page, let alone in the heat of performance. We found, however, that if we played the subtext of their relationship it not only let the characters say what they were thinking about each other without actually saying it, it also lent the exchange a dynamism and clarity that transcended the problems of Elizabethan pun-age. So when Romeo says 'Pink for flower' (II.iv.57) he is calling Mercutio -and probably for the first time, since hee has the security of his new life with Juliet now and doesn't need to humour Mercutio any more - a homosexual. Mercutio chooses not to take the bait ('Right', II.iv.58), but before long they are into a debate about 'geese', and again Romeo is quite bold with Mercutio:
ROMEO Thou wast never with me for anything when they wast not there for the goose [i.e. my 'goose'].
MERCUTIO I will bite thee by the ear for that jest.
ROMEO Nay, good goose, bite not [i.e. get off me, I've had enough].
Nothing is explicitly stated, but Romeo is cutting Mercutio off, and while it is Mercutio who ultimately wins the race of wits it is Romeo who is leaving him behind. I didn't want this to seem vindictive as Romeo is undoubtedly deeply fond of Mercutio - he has to be for the later scenes to work - but it is simply inevitable and necessary that he pushes Mercutio away. The choice our production took was that Mercutio's rage at his rejection and eventual death at the hands of his beloved transformed itself into a vengeance that would extend beyond the grave. When Mercutio is taken off stage to die shouting 'a plague a' both your houses' (III..i.106), he is fully intending to be the author of that plague and will (in our production) reappear later in the play, first handing over the poison that will kill Romeo and then, as Friar John, regretfully informing Friar Lawrence that he couldn't deliver his letter. This notion that the fates were a real and motivated influence on events in the world of the play had resonances throughout the production. In the purely pragmatic sense this device of Mercutio as an evil avenging angel neatly justified one of Shakespeare's less integrated plot twists 'Nay, good goose, bite not.' (the play is no longer a tragedy about a dodgy postal service), but the broader implication of a divinity that shapes our ends was something that I found particularly interesting in terms of Romeo himself and his entire world view.
It struck me very early on that Romeo had a fairly well-developed sense of the world of fate and destiny. He talks of his dreams and makes numerous references to the stars and what lies in them. It seemed to make sense that someone trapped in a world of very real physical conflict that he wants no part of, should yearn to exist in a world outside himself, and should be searching for something new to believe in. This became a very important touchstone for me as I tried to draw this character and it provided the backbone of my understanding of his emotional responses. The first explicit reference I found was his justification for not going to the Capulet ball by saying 'I dreamt a dream tonight' (I.iv.50) - a protest soon demolished and sneered at by the decidedly earthbound Mercutio, but something which nonetheless is a very real fear for Romeo. After the others exit at the end of the scene he is left to mull over his trepidation:
I fear, too early. For my mind misgives Some consequence, yet hanging in the stars, Shall bitterly begin his fearful date With this night's revels and expire the term Of a despised life, closed in my breast, By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
(I.iv.106-II)
It's an unspecific, yet creeping, panic that threatens to overwhelm him. I played this speech with my eyes glued to a particular space in the auditorium, as if these malignant stars that shaped his end had a physical location. It was a spot my eyes would return to later. This wasn't superstition on Romeo's part but a very palpable dread and one that would continue to haunt him. I began to wonder what this dream he had had could be, and the answer came from an idea of Michael Boyd's to have Romeo speak the Prologue.
Two households, both alike in dignity In fair
Verona, where we lay our scene . . .
(Prologue, 1-2)
is one of those bits of Shakespeare that the audience can practically chant along with you. It is usually spoken at the very top of the play (as written), often by the actor playing Escalus. Michael's idea was to have the Prologue spoken midway through the first scene, so that it would cut through the street-fight and suspend the action; and he also wanted it to be spoken by Romeo. This wouldn't be the same Romeo that we would meet for the first time a few minutes later, however; this would be Romeo after his death, a spectre who could speak the Prologue with all the despair, resignation and even bitterness, of hindsight. As the action on stage was suspended, I could even address some of it to other characters in the play, so the lines
And the continuance of the parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, naught could remove
(lines 10-11)
could be said directly to my father, who was even then in the midst of a sword fight with Capulet. It was a bold choice which, you could say, takes the idea of the Prologue as an alienation device to its logical conclusion. It helped, I think, to confound audience expectation early on - something that we'd always been keen to do. It also helped me to answer my own question. This became Romeo's dream, this vision of himself walking through an all-too-familiar battlefield as a ghost of himself telling a story that would only make partial sense, but warned of a tragedy that would take his life. Indeed, as his story unfolded it would seem that this portent of doom was only becoming ever more inescapable.
So it is a Romeo full of angst, anxiety and little joy that first claps eyes on Juliet. It is probably in these first couple of scenes between Romeo and Juliet that the actors feel the greatest pressure of expectation and history. It is very difficult not to try to play the whole thing at once as you struggle to tell the audience that you are 'the greatest lovers of all time'. The solution, of course, is not to think about all that and just play the scenes as they come off the page, but that is easier said than done, particularly in that first scene between the pair which lasts all of eighteen lines, the first fourteen of which famously arrange themselves into a sonnet - ending in the couple's first kiss.
You have a lot of ground to cover in this short scene. By the time they part at the end of it the pair have to have turned their respective lives around to follow each other to the end of time, irrespective of consequences. When Alex Gilbreath and I came to the scene for the first time we tried to tell the story of this huge, life-changing moment with every word. We tried to imbue the scene with every delicate romantic thought we could muster until every word dripped with unspoken meaning - with the result that the scene was absurdly slow and entirely turgid.
We were duly sent off to have a session with Cicely Berry, the RSC's resident verse-speaking guru. Although officially retired, Cis is still very involved with the Company and at hand to help actors through some of the trickier sections of the plays she knows so well. She got us to look at the scene afresh and examine exactly what Shakespeare is doing in the language. So we started again, stripping the whole thing down and dumping the baggage: after all, these two people may be the most famous couple in the English-speaking world, but at this point they have never met before. Their conversation (I.v.93 - 106) begins with what is, to my mind, a rather brilliant chat-up line from Romeo:
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this. My
lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
I'm quite sure that he's used this line before. It seems far too polished and well constructed to be an extempore remark and it is right up his particular alley of pure obsession. He casts himself as a pilgrim and the object of his love as the holiest of saints. Even if he has tried this line before, however, he has never had the response that he now enjoys:
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this. For
saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
And this is where it all starts changing for Romeo. Not only has he been entranced by the physical shape of Juliet from across a crowded dance-floor; now he has met his match intellectually. They are sparring with their wits now. He takes her argument and uses it against her:
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
But, again, she is too quick for him:
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Continuing the idea, Romeo appeals to her - as it were 'in character' -and warns her that she is responsible for his immortal soul:
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
And Juliet, ever his equal, manages to give in, knowing full well where all this is leading, without losing any of her own dignity: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake. And so, on the last line of the sonnet, Romeo and Juliet kiss and their destiny is sealed:
Then move not while my prayer's effect I take.
We found that if we played the scene as a battle of wits, then the rest of the work was done for us. The innuendo is all in the text, and what can be sexier than two people who are attracted to each other trying to outdo each other - push each other away and at the same time reel each other in? The scene became much quicker and more urgent, with barely a pause for breath until after that first kiss. I realize that it can seem terribly mundane to say that the lesson we learned was simply to play the text, but often it proves more difficult than one would imagine, especially when the familiarity of the text you have to work with transcends its meaning.
There is a point immediately after this scene where Romeo discovers Juliet's identity and it seems that their relationship is finished before it can even begin. I wanted to tell the story of Romeo settling in to the doomed inevitability of it all. He is, after all, the misunderstood poet who can never be happy, and to be in love with the daughter of his father's mortal foe is almost too perfect. If Rosaline, the novice nun, was a bad choice of girlfriend, then Juliet is even more of a disaster. When he wanders into the orchard below Juliet's window, he has no reason to believe that this is anything other than another Rosaline situation where he can protest his unrequited love to an unforgiving world.
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
(II.ii.2)
This is another line that seems beyond reinterpretation, but I tried to play the very real danger of the situation. If Romeo is caught in this orchard, under this window, he will be killed without question, something that Michael was always reminding us of and which would help to power the scene that followed. It is only Romeo's free-wheeling imagination that pulls him back towards the dream of Juliet. The speech which follows is a glorious marriage of the poetic and the earthly- as, indeed, is Romeo and Juliet's entire relationship. He compares Juliet to the sun, and then she is the moon's maid, wearing green livery (a reference to virginity) which he urges her to cast off, and his final thought is 'That I might touch that cheek' (II.ii.25). She is still a heavenly body to him, but there is a genuine sense of his sexual desire too. He is marrying the idolization of his heart's desire (which we have seen with Rosaline) with very real sexual urges: already their relationship is more real and mature, but it is all still part of Romeo's fancy until he hears Juliet say
O Romeo, Romeo! - wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
(II.ii.33 - 6)
And it is only here that Romeo's journey really begins. For the first time his love is reciprocated, for the first time he has found his soul-mate, and from that moment his destiny is set in stone. From that moment he is, as he will later realize, playing straight into the arms of the fates he was so keen to avoid.
Act Two, Scene Two, the 'Balcony Scene', is one that Alex and I always enjoyed playing. For a start, it is the only point in the whole play that Romeo and Juliet actually get to spend any real time together, so everything else that happens springs from this twenty-minute scene. Both the characters speak the most wonderful lines; not only is the text very beautiful, however, it is also very human, and at times, it transpired, very funny. We never set out to 'get laughs' in the balcony scene, but they did happen. All we tried to do was to play the situation and the dialogue as truthfully as we could, and I suppose the act of two people falling in love and getting to know each other is not altogether without its lighter side. Michael certainly guarded against any accusation of sentimentality and kept this scene on a strictly truthful basis by shouting 'Soup!' at us during rehearsal if ever we slipped into the bog of emotional overindulgence. There is also a conflict of interest between them in this scene, with Juliet full of the practicalities of the danger Romeo is in and the need for him to get to safety, and Romeo's desire to flout the risks in order to tell her how enchanted he is:
JULIET If they do see thee, they will murder thee.
ROMEO Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye
Than twenty of their swords! Look thou but sweet,
And I am proof against their enmity.
(II.ii.70-3)
This youthful, idealistic, and completely charming Romeo will develop into something else very quickly. In Act Three, Scene Five, after they have spent their first night together and Romeo must leave before they are discovered, the roles have changed. He is the husband now, and has taken on the responsibility he has for both of them. Then it is Juliet who wants to ignore the truth and Romeo who takes control: 'I must be gone and live, or stay and die' (III.V.II). Both of them, however, are aware of the gravity of their situation from the beginning. When Juliet proposes the idea of marriage (and the initial idea does come from her: Romeo is slower to grasp the necessity of practical action), he doesn't hesitate to agree. They have to legitimize their relationship if it is to have any chance of surviving in this climate.
Act III, Scene v: 'I must be gone and live, or stay and die.' Again that sense of violence that pervades their lives defines both of their characters in so many ways. Romeo talks to none of his friends about this most important of life-changes - simply because he can't risk it. The only person he can turn to is the friar. The friar is one of the most important keys to figuring out who Romeo is. It is the friar who is Romeo's closest confidant, it is to him that Romeo takes all his problems, and it is in the friar's cell that Romeo hides out after he has killed Tybalt. Des McAleer provided our production with a brilliant, solid, no-nonsense friar who offered a strong counter to any of Romeo's adolescent extremities. We wanted there to be a familiarity between the pair that was to do with mutual affection and respect. We decided that Romeo, forever in the grip of some existential argument with himself, would be regularly at the friar's cell, picking his brains and quizzing him on the nature of his own beliefs. We felt that the friar (not a conventional priest) would enjoy debating the finer points of theology with his young friend and it made great sense to me that Romeo, in search of some world outwith his own, would need the outlet of someone who considered things on the spiritual plane. It is not always an easy relationship, however. The friar doesn't give Romeo an easy time when he reveals that he has fallen in love with Juliet, and it seems clear that Romeo expects it to be a hard sell as the friar has to force him to get to the point:
Be plain, good son, and homely in thy drift.
Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift.
(II.iii.51-2)
But Romeo needs someone to test him like this and the friar provides that for him. It is also the friar who sees Romeo at his most vulnerable. The scene which closed the first half in our production, Act Three, Scene One, contains a pivotal moment for Romeo. After the unconfined joy of the lightning marriage ceremony, things are beginning to look up for young Montague and for the first time it looks possible that he might just live happily ever after. Running into a vengeful Tybalt in the street is the last thing Romeo had gambled on, and the resulting sword fight which will see Romeo cause Mercutio's death and then kill Tybalt in vengeful rage, destroys any sensation of the hope that Romeo was beginning to feel.
It is a brilliantly written scene, one which we found came to life fairly easily, since each of the characters is so strongly motivated in opposing directions and the stakes are so high: for Tybalt, his own pride and need for revenge; for Mercutio, the need to protect the honour of his friend; and for Romeo, the future of his wife and the safety of both his friend and his new cousin-in-law. Romeo is paralysed by his need to maintain the secrecy of his brand new wife, and it is this paralysis that leads to his ill-advised attempt to stop the fight between Tybalt and Mercutio. The extraordinary stage fight between Adrian Schiller and Keith Dunphy (playing Tybalt), put together by fight-director Terry King, made this very easy to play. The more dangerous the battle looks, the more impotent and terrified Romeo becomes, making his eventual intervention all the more desperate.
These feelings of impotence and fear make Romeo's sense of inequity - and, more importantly, guilt - at Mercuttio's death all the sharper. Adrian's Mercutio showed no forgiveness at his death — he would, after all, be back in the second half to kill me off— and so I was left on stage full of remorse, anger and a sense of bewilderment at what had just occurred. Again Romeo sees it all written in the all-seeing, ever-malicious stars:
This day's black fate on more days doth depend.
This but begins the woe others must end.
(III.i.119-20)
It was important to me that when Tybalt reappeared Romeo dispatched him quickly, violently, and with as little sense of honour as possible. We know that Romeo is not, by nature, violent and there is nothing in the text to suggest that he is a particularly good swordsman (Mercutio suggests earlier in the scene that he is no match for Tybalt), so if we are to believe that he could kill Tybalt it has to be a sudden, reckless act done in the blind heat of a moment's pure rage. He is in a miasma of confusion, injustice and terrible, terrible guilt and the presence of Tybalt alive and well with the sight of Mercutio's blood still vivid in Romeo's mind pushes him into a stupor of fury and violence. It is several lines later, with Tybalt dead at his feet and Benvolio pleading with him to make a run for it, before the true gravity of what he has done wakens Romeo out of his reverie of vengeance. With 'O, I am fortune's fool' (III.i.136) Romeo sees his life unravelling before his very eyes. Suddenly he has single-handedly killed his future, his hope, and another human being. One of his closest friends is dead and he has become a murderer. His chances of living happily ever after have evaporated terrifyingly quickly.
The scene in the friar's cell (III.iii) where Romeo learns that he is to be banished from Verona, sees him at his most helpless. Romeo has no one to blame but himself for the death of Tybalt, and consequently the death of his marriage to Tybalt's cousin, and it is the friar who gets the full front of Romeo's rage of helplessness. I didn't want to hold back on this. I felt that Romeo would react like a cornered animal, lashing out at the friar and blaming him for his predicament. Unreasonable and childish though that may be, this is, it seems to me, often how we treat those closest to us. Shakespeare certainly gives Romeo (ever the poet) a rash of words to express himself with. The word banished chimes through this scene (and the previous one) like a death-knell and every time it came up I would try to use it to punish the friar, to hurt someone else as I had been hurt. It is Romeo's crisis point, and it is the friar who lifts him out of it. The friar is Romeo's base point, to which he will always come home. They are much more in tune than Romeo and his parents are; indeed father and son is the dynamic of their relationship. It is important that Romeo has an unquestioning trust of the friar - as children often do of their parents - to allow the events at the end of the play to unfold as they do.
When Romeo reappears after being banished to Mantua (and being off stage for the whole of Act Four), I felt he should have matured and moved on. No longer dressed all in black, he's been away from the continual threats and challenges of Veronese life and although he's being denied his Juliet, he seems calm. He's had some time in isolation to think things through and plan the life that he and Juliet may lead together. It is as if he has finally managed to escape the fingers of the fates. Certainly the dream he talks of at the start of Act Five, Scene One is of an optimistic nature (albeit with a morbid flavour) and it seems that he can finally see light at the end of the tunnel. This calmness and state of readiness perhaps explains his reaction to the news that Juliet is dead: 'Is it e'en so? Then I defy you, stars!' (v.i.24). He refuses to be beaten by his own destiny and there are no tears or protestations of grief. In that instant I wanted him to see everything that must happen very clearly. His language is certainly full of practicality and he sees a clear sequence of events. The thought of dying alongside Juliet becomes inevitable and absolutely necessary and no side-issue - emotional or otherwise - must get in the way. He becomes filled with such full-fronted motivation that from that moment until he sees Juliet's body, he slips into another reality altogether. Michael described its being as if he were full of 'toxic energy' and this is the energy that kills Paris and threatens to do away with Balthasar. It is only when he has lifted Juliet out of the grave and is cradling her in his arms that he can breathe again and begin to understand where circumstances have brought him. I find Romeo's final speech fascinating. There is relatively little self-indulgence or grief. Instead I found there to be a strong sense of some-one who has come home. The only thing that seems to damage his resolve to die is Juliet's lack of decay:
Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe
That insubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that I still will stay with thee
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again.
(v.iii.101-8)
And then the idea of dying becomes a release:
Here, here [repeating the word seems to underline his resolve] will I remain
With worms that are thy chambermaids. O here [again]
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.
(v.iii.108-12)
So finally he has beaten the fates that have been pushing him around and forcing this misplaced poet to live in a world that he doesn't fit into, and in death he can finally escape and be with the woman who understood him. In our production Michael had Alex and me walking through the people round the tomb after our death and then walking off the stage and out through the audience so that, indeed, through death, Romeo and Juliet had somehow escaped. The real tragedy is left for those who have to rebuild this ruined society. One suspects that their problems are bigger than a couple of gold statues can mend.
Romeo and Juliet is a much-produced play full of lines more famous than any of the actors who could hope to play them. One could never hope to be definitive in it, but I'm glad to have had the chance to give it a crack and I look forward to seeing it performed again and again in years to come, so that I can see the way it should have been done. And it goes without saying that I shall greatly enjoy terrorizing young actors by telling them how very, very tricky it is!
Thursday, 28 January 2010
As You Like It
Smallwood, Robert (editor) (2000). Players of Shakespeare 4: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, David Tennant on playing Touchstone in As You Like It, pp. 30–44. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521794161
DAVID TENNANT
David Tennant played Touchstone in Steven Pimlott's production of As You Like It at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1996 and at the Barbican Theatre later that year and into 1997. It was his first season with the RSC and his other roles were Hamilton in The General from America and Jack Lane in The Herbal Bed. His earlier stage work had included a wide range of classical and modern roles in seasons at the Manchester Royal Exchange, the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, and elsewhere, as well as at the Royal National Theatre. He has also worked extensively on radio and television.
'I hear Roy Kinnear was marvellous . . .'
I auditioned for Orlando. I knew As You Like It from seeing it at school (but I didn't remember much about that) and, of course, I had read it at drama school but it wasn't one of the plays that I was particularly familiar with. I knew it was broadly about some woman dressing up as a bloke with some 'hey-nonny-no' type songs and a famous speech in the middle.
I was in the thick of rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie up in Dundee when the call came to get to London for an RSC audition, giving me woefully little time to prepare. I picked the brains of the people twas working with to get a bit more of an idea what I was going up for. 'Basically', the collective conclusion was, 'it's a play about a woman who dresses up as a bloke with some "hey-nonny-no" type songs and a famous speech in the middle . . . oh, and there's a clown called Touchstone in it, the usual confusing Shakespearian jokes - thankless part.' I remembered Touchstone from reading the play. It struck me as the sort of part I'd be useless at, stuffed with endless 'routines' and thick with references which had lost any contemporaneousness about three hundred years ago. However, I didn't need to worry about that, they'd find some brilliant comic to play that part and he'd fill it with plenty of hilarious business that would bring it bang up to date. I had to concern myself with Orlando - not an easy part in itself but at least I could approach it fairly conventionally. I could look at who the character was, what he wanted, what his through-line was and so on. I flew down to London the next day, cribbing furiously. I'd skim-read the play the night before and now I was concentrating on each of Orlando's scenes in turn. It was a very tricky part, at once full of bullish machismo, then suddenly prancing through the trees in the depths of romantic gooey-ness, but by the time I arrived at the Barbican I had it all figured out (I thought) and I strolled in ready to thrill Steven Pimlott (the director) with my brilliant, intelligent and - dare I say - revelatory take on one of Shakespeare's trickiest lovers.
'I'd like you to have a read of a bit of Touchstone' was Mr Pimlott's opening statement. I was sure I'd misheard.
'Sorry?'
'Touchstone . . . I'd like you to read a bit of Touchstone.'
Steven flashed me a large, open smile. If this was some audition tactic to disarm me, I was indeed duly disarmed.
'But . . . em . . .' - stay calm I told myself - 'I was to audition for Orlando.'
'Well, yes, but I'd like to hear a bit of Touchstone.'
'OK' I replied, trying (and failing) with all my Scottish Presbyterian stoicism to sound like I thought it was a great idea. 'Fine. What would you like to look at?' We read a couple of scenes through. It was all I could do to pronounce some of it let alone fill it with charm or vivacity. I didn't understand most of it and as for being funny . . .
I was back on the plane that evening feeling very sorry for myself, nursing a bruised ego and smarting as the dream of an RSC season slipped away. So to say I was surprised two days later when my agent rang to say I'd been offered the part of Touchstone is the understatement of all time. Of course I accepted without thinking. It was a main part in a Shakespeare play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon- Avon, not something I could consider turning down; but over the next two weeks before we started work on it I began seriously to doubt my own sanity.
To start with I re-read the play. It struck me how episodic it all is, how many different stories are going on at the same time and yet how little actually happens. It seemed different to any other Shakespeare play I had read with a pace and charm and quirkiness which I imagined would be hard to get the measure of. It has one monster part (Rosalind the heroine/hero) and a very full and varied supporting cast each of whom seems to fulfil a very definite role. Orlando is the lover, Celia the friend, Duke Frederick the bad guy, Jaques the contrast, Silvius and Phebe the complimentary sub-plot, and Touchstone the comedian. Ay, there's the rub. I could see that Touchstone was supposed to be funny in terms of the structure of the play, the tone of his scenes, and the fact that everyone keeps going on about how hilarious he is. Jaques in particular, an otherwise miserable sod, when confronted with Touchstone, finds his 'lungs began to crow like Chanticleer' (II.vii.3o) and yet I could find nothing in the part to make me even smile. Through the rest of the play I found a lot of genuinely funny exchanges. Rosalind was very witty, Celia sported a fine line in caustic sarcasm and Jaques's melancholy cynicism gave him some wonderful put-downs, but all Touchstone seemed to have was long speeches heavy with obscure double entendres and long tracts of cool philosophy, but nothing obviously funny. I couldn't imagine many Chanticleer-like lungs were going to be found in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the coming summer.
The next morning I bought myself a copy of the Arden study notes on As You Like It (I liked the appropriateness of the publisher) as well as two more editions of the play and I began the slow process of finding a way into this character. It's not a huge part, just seven scenes of which three or four are little more than sketches which Shakespeare seems to use to puncture the action now and again with a breath of silliness. Unlike Feste in Twelfth Night or even the fool in King Lear, he does have his own bit of plot line in his relationship with Audrey, but quite what the nature of that is is far from clear. Does he love and want to marry her or does he just want to get his leg over? He seems uncertain himself and changes his mind from scene to scene, even from line to line -but more of that later.
All too soon it was our first day of rehearsal and . . . the read-through. Always a terrifying experience when you speak your lines out loud in front of people for the first time, a read-through at the Royal Shakespeare Company is particularly scary, not only because you are at the home of 'world class classical theatre' (as all the brochures tell you) with all the history and influence of hundreds of great, definitive productions hanging in the air, but also because it's one of the few theatre companies in the country that can afford to employ the numbers of actors required to stage a full scale Shakespearian production, so the room is full of people! I sat in my place in the huge circle of chairs with palms sweating and heart racing. Everybody else in the room seemed to attack their parts with intelligence and ability. Niamh Cusack playing Rosalind was graceful and calm and the verse seemed to pour off her tongue; Rachel Joyce as Celia spoke the words like they were her own, not four hundred years old at all; Liam Cunningham gave Orlando a vigour and a believability (and I instantly understood why it shouldn't be my part). As my first cue approached I took a deep breath and hoped for the best. Feeling very small and hopeless I just gabbled Touchstone out as quickly as possible, fully expecting to be sacked at any moment and of course . . . nobody found any of it the least bit funny.
Before we began rehearsal proper Steven Pimlott and stalked through our initial thoughts and impressions of what Touchstone was all about. Court jesters or fools fall into two categories: the clowns and the naturals, the former being professional comedians employed to entertain by virtue of their comic talent and the latter being local simpletons or village idiots who would find themselves dressed up and kept around to be laughed at by the court.
We decided almost immediately that Touchstone was no natural. His wit was too logical, too satirical to be accidental. He was evidently very learned and he appears very much Rosalind and Celia's intellectual equal rather than some poor gormless idiot whom they take pity on. Although Celia calls him a 'natural' early on ('Nature . . . hath sent this natural for our whetstone' (I.ii.3I-2) ) that is almost certainly a term of gentle abuse rather than a statement of actuality Therefore as a professional jester Touchstone is, quite literally, living on his wits. The life of a parodist or satirist in the retinue of a recently established usurping monarch cannot be an easy one.
Dictatorships are notoriously suspicious of entertainers, especially ones who comment on current affairs, however humorously, and yet that is one of the traditional roles that a court jester would fulfil. So at the start of the play Touchstone must be treading a fine line: he must make Duke Frederick laugh - and indeed he seems to do just that: 'the roynish clown at whom so oft/Your grace was wont to laugh' (II.ii.8-9) - but he must also prod at the bubble of this fragile new government without bursting it and being silenced forever by a paranoid new authority.
Bearing all that in mind makes Touchstone's escape to Arden with Rosalind and Celia both understandable and inevitable. But it is only later when Touchstone severs all his links with the court by (temporarily) leaving Rosalind and Celia that he can enjoy his own journey. As long as he's 'one of the girls' keeping the princesses company and making them laugh he can never really grow up, but once he's set free in the forest he experiences a sort of crude 'rite of passage' with Audrey as the catalyst. In Arden he can enjoy all the liberties of humanity denied him by his position at court. Of course he is drawn back to court life by the end of the play but he's grown up and he's in love . . . well lust at least! His horizons have expanded. But how should he be played? Steven and I talked through a few ideas. He should certainly be mercurial and chameleon-like; he'd need to be. To survive in Frederick's court he'd have to be all things to all men, responding to each situation appropriately to keep his head (quite literally). Perhaps he'd even have a collection of characters and voices that he could slip in and out of; and that could easily spill over into the way he relates to Corin or Audrey or William in the forest. There should certainly be some sort of play-acting going on in front of Corin and Audrey to whom he is telling, no doubt, all manner of lies about his pedigree. As Jaques notes at the end: 'he hath been a courtier, he swears' (v.iv.41).
There is also the problem about how to make sense of those long passages of text where Touchstone 'goes off on one' and strings long chains of thoughts and witticisms together out of thin air. We needed to create a character who liked the sound of his own voice and the buzz of his own brain. Even outside the court when presumably he wasn't being paid to be 'witty' any longer he persists in playing with words and twisting ideas around. His exchange with Corin in Act Three, Scene Two is full of convoluted lateral thinking and the encounter with William (v.i) is verbal diarrhoea on a grand scale. It struck me that he was like a manic depressive who suffered periods of melancholia - when Jaques reports his encounter with Touchstone (II.vii) the 'motley fool' sounds far from happy - before bouncing through periods of mild mania. The flights of ideas, the energy of thought and the inability to shut up are all traits of manic episodes in a hi-polar mental illness. It is perhaps an actor's affectation to think of Shakespearian characterization in this way, but it helped me to make sense of some of Touchstone's less easily motivated moments. A heightened libido can also be symptomatic of mania which certainly feeds into Touchstone's attachment to Audrey!
In terms of how the character would look, the decision had already been taken by Steven, who was keen that I should be dressed in a traditional fool's outfit. That was fine by me. There are so many references in the text to the 'motley fool' that it would be problematic and unhelpful not to wear the chequered coat and with that comes the threepronged hat with bells on the end all in vibrant red, green and yellow. In a sense it would help to give the audience an immediate visual reference point as to what Touchstone was in this world and anyway I've always liked long coats so I'd feel very happy in it - whatever the colours. In the end our designer, Ashley Martin-Davis, came up with a very striking and stylish outfit which seemed perfect to me. If Touchstone had to wear the fool's uniform he's enough of a snob to make sure he cut a dash in it.
And so, with another deep breath, we began rehearsal proper. My first session was on Act One, Scene Two, my first scene (obviously enough). Steven's way of working begins with a good couple of hours just reading through the scene and discussing what is going on. Niamh Cusack, Rachel Joyce and I were keen that there should be a real 'girls' changing room' feeling to this scene between Touchstone and the princesses. Of course I felt immediately defeated by Touchstone's first exchange. All that stuff about pancakes and mustard - not exactly opening on a sure-fire laugh. Steven was keen that we should concentrate on the situation. Touchstone is being sent to fetch Celia to her father - not his job. He's being used and abused by Duke Frederick, probably to the delight of the other courtiers, which will deeply disgruntle the proud Touchstone. Steven also encouraged me to think the 'certain knight' that swore 'by his honour they were good pancakes and swore by his honour the mustard was naught' (I.ii.6I-3) was actually Duke Frederick himself, which added an extra dynamic to the scene as I was being rude about Celia's father, That way the scene began to take shape with the three chums having a bit of a falling out because Touchstone is so annoyed with the Duke. It also helped feed into the story of the play itself with Celia being forced to examine her loyalties - does she side with her increasingly disenfranchised friends or with her increasingly alienating father? - and it shows Touchstone's disenchantment and grumpiness about the state he finds himself in. Then the trio can be united again seconds later as they all take great delight in ridiculing Monsieur Le Beau.
My initial problem was that I felt a great presume to come on and be funny! I was the comic after all, but the whole pancakes/mustard section simply doesn't work as purely a comic turn: it isn't funny enough for a start and the language is so opaque so early on in the play that a modern audience is going to find it very hard to listen to such an odd argument. With something else to play it freed me up to concentrate on what I was saying and why I was saying it. This all sounds ludicrously obvious as I write it now. Of course actors need to be thinking of the situation and motivation for what they are saying, but these famous Shakespearian roles can come with a lot of baggage attached. A lot of people seemed very keen to tell me how hilarious Roy Kinnear had been as Touchstone; how memorable Patrick Wymark; how scene-stealing Kenneth Branagh; or Griff Rhys Jones in the movie version; how only a few years ago on the RST stage Mark Williams had received such glowing reviews in the part. I hadn't seen any of them (I'm sure they were all brilliant) but in my mind they hung like immoveable monuments to great comic acting and to a wee boy frae Paisley coming to the Royal Shakespeare Company for the first time they were spectres that proved hard to banish. Of course the only way to exorcise these ghosts is to do your own version of this new part as you would any other, to approach it as you would a new part in a new play, but I could feel the finger of history tapping on my inexperienced shoulder and the pressure was: 'be funny or sink!'
Meanwhile back in rehearsal Steven was hammering away at the text, picking us up on each mixed emphasis and every ignored alliteration point and slowly the ancient, often unwieldy language was beginning to come to life and make sense. It was very early on that we decided I should use my own accent in the part. He's very much a 'one-off' character within the world of the play so why shouldn't he have a 'one-off' accent? And besides, if we were going to explore the idea of using different voices then I'd be in a much better position if I started from my own. It seemed perfectly logical to me - I never ceased to be amazed in the coming months how much attention that particular decision received. I think people thought I was making some great comment on the serfdom of a nation or something; it was simply me giving myself one less thing to worry about!
By the time we came to rehearse Touchstone's next scene (II.iv), the escape to Arden, Steven's vision of the play was beginning to come into focus. He'd been keen to allow things to develop slowly. (The longer rehearsal processes afforded at the RSC allow actors and directors a little more freedom than elsewhere, where deadlines and design requirements mean a lot of fundamental decisions have to be made before rehearsals even begin, sometimes before a full cast has been assembled.) Steven had decided that we should be costumed fairly traditionally and in a basically neutral set, but other ideas were evolving gradually as we all reacted to the play day by day. As far as Arden was concerned, Steven was coming round to the idea that it should be a far from welcoming place, nothing like the Utopia that Rosalind and Celia think they're heading for. So we came onstage in the midst of a snowstorm. This allowed me to play to the hilt Touchstone's self-righteous indignation at being dragged along (even if underneath it all he's quite glad to be away from the court) . So a line like 'Ay, now am I in Arden, the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place, but travellers must be content' (II.iv.13-15) can positively drip with sarcasm.
My biggest problem in this scene, and it's one that I've never really come to terms with, is that if Touchstone is genuinely miserable and disconsolate and unhelpful then where does one find the springboard to launch into the whole 'Jane Smile' routine on line 42? Steven suggested that Touchstone is taking it upon himself to cheer the princesses up but that doesn't seem to be in keeping with the grumpy complainer of only a few lines before. It also lands you with the earlier problem of trying to do a 'turn' and very little else. As a speech it is crammed full of double entendre: 'I broke my sword upon a stone and bid him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile' (II.iv..43-4) and obscure references like 'batler' and 'peascod' so there is a fairly technical exercise to be done in merely trying to help an audience follow all the things one is trying to communicate as well as trying to key in to the rest of what's going on. In the end I went for the idea that Silvius's pining for Phebe has triggered a genuine memory in Touchstone which he then relives as he retells it - fondly at first as he remembers Jane, and even with a smile: 'I remember the kissing of her batler and the cow's dugs that her pretty chopt hands had milked', then bemusement 'I remember the wooing of a peascod instead of her', even reliving the tearful frustration of saying ' "Wear these for my sake'' ' before snapping out of his reverie to evaluate how ludicrous it all is: 'We that are true lovers run into strange capers' (II.iv.44-5o). And that, I suppose, is the purpose of the speech - to illuminate the ludicrousness of being in love so that the whole thing is also being used by Touchstone as a message to the absent Silvius and, more particularly, to Rosalind, warning them off all this romantic nonsense. I still don't feel entirely happy with how it works. I'll probably be sitting in the bath in three years' time and I'll scream 'that's how I should have done that bit!' but for now I tinker away with it every night trying to make it fit its corners into a still round hole.
It's only really after this scene that Touchstone comes into his own as he begins to enjoy his country life. In our production the weather changes and Arden becomes a much more magical, welcoming place. The long exchange with Corin, the shepherd, in Act Three, Scene Two seemed impenetrable at first. Steven was keen to see a battle of wits between the two, like a pair of music hall turns trying to outdo each other. The old pro coming up against the young pretender, if you like, as the countryside meets the court. Of course Touchstone thinks he'll walk away with it, but Corin is much more of a match for him than he'd anticipated. I started work on the scene by trying to throw everything at it. Touchstone became a spinning top chucking off silly voices, silly walks, even acrobatics to try and inject some life into what appeared to me to be a long, wordy and dry argument. Of course what I was doing was running scared of the words and not trusting Shakespeare. I was taken in hand by Cicely Berry, the RSC'S world famous voice expert and all round guru who has an almost supernatural gift for sniffing out what actors need to help them find a way into something. She took Arthur Cox (playing Corin) and myself and stripped all the fireworks away and just made us investigate the arguments. I just listened to the brilliantly lucid Arthur and responded to what he said, the arguments began to make sense and the sparring between the two characters became very real. Steven brought us right down stage and sat us with our feet hanging over the front of the thrust so the whole scene began as a very low key chat (as Steven put it, an after dinner stroll through the woods with two chaps content in each other's company) until Touchstone starts to show off: 'In respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught' (III.ii.14-15) and so on, then throws it over to Corin. 'Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?' (line 21) only to find that the simple countryman is more than a match for him. As we play the scene Arthur's Corin remains splendidly solid and unflappable, arching the occasional eyebrow at Touchstone's excesses. In our production, at least whilst Touchstone has the last word, it is Corin who wins the battle. The only silly voice that remains is a dash of Ian Paisley on 'Then thou art damned' (line 33). I'm afraid I couldn't resist it!
Following this exchange comes Touchstone's last scene with Rosalind. Early on in rehearsal Niamh and I cooked up all manner of elaborate ideas about their relationship; that the reason Touchstone ridicules Orlando's poems is due to his jealousy that Rosalind should be falling in love with someone else. Absolute rubbish of course: we tried it for a while but we were playing a subtext that simply didn't exist. The scene is more about Touchstone enjoying taking advantage of the fact that he can ridicule Rosalind and Orlando's affair whilst Rosalind is impotent to stop him, being dressed as the boy Ganymede in the presence of Corin. One nice touch that developed at the end of the scene was that I had a handful of poems torn off the trees and on the line 'You have said, but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge' (III.ii.117) I tossed them into the audience. Initially it was just a device to get them off the stage but it actually seems to ask the audience to act as jury on it all and to evaluate all these different versions of 'love' that are about to pass before them.
From there to the end of the play Touchstone is concerned with wooing the shepherdess Audrey. Susanna Elliott-Knight is a brilliant Audrey and we both toiled long and hard together trying to make sense of their relationship. Does Audrey love Touchstone or does she just like the idea of marrying a rich bloke? Does Touchstone love Audrey or does he just want to get his leg over at any cost? The fact is that Touchstone seems to have no clear idea of what he's after from one moment to the next. Certainly in their first scene together he tells Jaques that the vicar Oliver Martext: 'is not like to marry me well; and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife' (III.iii.82-4), so this is not looking like someone ready to make a lifelong commitment, but then the very next time we see the 'happy' couple and Audrey is complaining that Martext would have done the job well enough, Touch stone calls him: 'A most wicked Sir Oliver, Audrey, a most vile Martext' (v.i.5-6) and proceeds to make a great deal of fuss at seeing off Audrey's previous boyfriend William when he comes to 'lay claim' to her.
I found the only way to deal with Touchstone's apparent contradictions through these last few scenes was to stop striving for the logical through-line and to play each moment as it arrives. After all, the evolution of any human relationship is far from linear and playing all the contradictions actually helps to make their courtship more believable in my opinion. I don't think Touchstone is ever convinced that he wants to get married until Hymen casts her spell in the final scene and his indecision is spirited away.
In the first half of Act Five Touchstone and Audrey have two short scenes, sketches really, that add virtually nothing to the (admittedly slender) plot. Act Five, Scene One is really just an elaborate set-up: Touchstone comes on and shows off in front of Audrey's boyfriend, Audrey's boyfriend is decidely unimpressed, Touchstone is crushed and Audrey sorts it all out; and Act Five, Scene Three is just an excuse for a song. In Shakespeare's day it would have given his comic a chance to do his turn and keep the groundlings happy, like a bit of music hall variety really. The cleverer we tried to be about it the harder it seemed to become.
Act Five, Scene One is rather like a Monty Python sketch. I adopted a Terry Thomas-esque accent and the props department supplied me with a walking stick version of the traditional jester's stick so that Touchstone transforms himself into a medieval 'hooray Henry'. He is in his element throwing questions and witticisms at the simple William and as the scene goes on his fervour grows so that by the time he gets to: 'He, sir, that must marry this woman' (v.i.45) he is positively flying. We played the rest of the scene with William (Simcon Defoe) watching impassively as Touchstone's mania mounted so that by 'I will o'er-run thee with policy; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways' (line 54) I was dancing around him, shrieking and threatening him with my walking stick, and with 'therefore tremble and depart' I was screaming in his face. Simeon coolly grabbed me by the shoulder and floored me with a headbutt for a good bit of (hopefully) amusing bathos.
For most of rehearsal Act Five, Scene Three had been reworked and edited down so that we dispensed with the two singing pages and Touchstone and Audrey sang the song straight out front as a piece of pure music hall. I found it very useful to have that sort of upfront opportunity to develop a relationship with the audience but Steven decided after a few weeks that it clashed with the overall style of the production and put a spoke in the rhythm of the play, so with a week or so of rehearsal left we went back to the script and two of the actors playing foresters (Nathaniel Duncan and Simon Westwood) were roped into the scene as the two singing pages. Ultimately, it seemed the correct decision to play the scene as written and by keeping it within the world of the play it allows the relationship with Audrey to develop a bit further. As the pages sang Audrey started to dance around, embarrassing Touchstone in front of these courtier-singers, but then she came over and started flirting with him until he lost all self-control and as the song came to an end the couple were rolling around the stage together. The cynical Touchstone has been dragged kicking and screaming in to living in the moment as the pages sing: 'And therefore take the present time . . . For love is crowned with the prime.'
So the couple make their way into the final scene and the wedding. The whole sequence where Touchstone meets Duke Senior and goes through the seven degrees of an argument is a bit of a tricky section to be met with at the end of a long play. It isn't Shakespeare's finest comic writing, several commentators have noted how it looks as if it was written fairly hurriedly, probably at a dress rehearsal when the company realized that the two boys playing Rosalind and Celia would need some time to get out of their disguises and into their wedding finery. Again I felt this terrific pressure to 'be funny' - instant death to any comic invention. There is no plot to be moved on, it's simply a delay to the happy ending. I resisted the overwhelming temptation to panic and tried to find a simple way through the scene. It is, of course, an audition.
Touchstone, with his new-found wife to support, will need a court to jest in, so the discovery of a benevolent Duke in the forest is an opportunity he can't miss out on. Jaques acts as his feed, introducing him and prompting him to go in to one of his routines. We played on this on the line 'I have had four quarrels, and like to have fought one' (v.iv.45) with Touchstone madly signalling to Jaques out of sight of the Duke until he tumbled what Touchstone was getting at and gave him his cue - 'and how was that ta'en up?' - allowing Touchstone to launch into his party piece on 'the Lie Direct' (whilst excusing his prospective bride as 'an ill favoured thing, sir, but mine own') I resisted the temptation to smother the 'Seven Degrees' speech with comic business or vocal gymnastics, firstly because I can't really do all that anyway and secondly because the speech is quite hard to listen to and I felt that if an audience were distracted by any gimmickry it would probably only help to make it sound like so much gibberish. So I concentrated, again with the invaluable help of Cicely Berry and Barbara Houseman of the RSC'S voice department, on making it as intelligible as possible. I tried to give each of the seven degrees a different attitude and an increasing level of seriousness as the argument hots up. Jaques became the courtier in the story as I told it to the Duke advancing toward Jaques on each 'degree' then referring back to the Duke to explain what was happening: 'this is called the Reply Churlish' etc. By the time I reached the Lie Direct I was right by Jaques and it was very stern and full of portent; then with Jaques's next line 'and how oft did you say his beard was not well cut' I would let it all drop to a cowardly dismissal of the whole thing 'I durst go no further than the Lie Circumstantial, nor he durst not give me the Lie Direct. And so we measured swords and parted' (lines 82-4) .
The next speech is the final thing that Touchstone says in the whole play and it's a perfect example of his convoluted, lateral-thinking logic. After listing the seven degrees again he says: 'All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct; and you may avoid that too, with an "If ''. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thoughtful of an "If": as, "If you said so, then I said so'' and they shook hands and swore brothers. Your "If" is the only peace-maker; much virtue in "If ''' (v.iv.93-100) . I always feel a great sense of achievement when the audience laughs at this bit because it means they've followed the circuitous arguments to the end and tuned in to Touchstone's bizarre way of thinking - and because they are genuinely responding to fourhundred- year-old jokes!
The play's ending is very difficult with Hymen appearing as a fairly crude deus ex machina to sellotape all these dodgy marriages together. It's hard to make something like that believable for a modern audience and in our production in Stratford Steven took the very bold step of having Hymen as an older woman entering the stage from the auditorium dressed as a member of the audience in modern-day clothes. It was certainly a disorientating moment for the audience and it proved a very controversial decision. With hindsight it probably didn't entirely work (indeed for the London run Hymen was transformed into an Elizabethan elemental figure who arrived through the back wall of the set) but Steven's intention was very valid: he wanted to emulate the shock of what it would actually be like for a god to appear to these characters and really to play with the frontiers of reality like that. It seems to me that Hymen must be a supernatural creature rather than Corin or another character in disguise as some directors have chosen to play it, because she does some fairly supernatural things to these couples; I can't believe Silvius and Phebe would ever get together otherwise and as for Celia and Oliver being 'heart to heart' - they've only just met and Oliver was a total bastard half an hour previously!
One of the last pieces of interpretation in our production comes when Touchstone presents Jaques with a skull just before he heads off to be rid of all the jollity at the new court. A lot of people have asked me why it happens and in truth I can't entirely enlighten them. Steven asked me to do it very early on in rehearsal: he had an idea about showing Jaques to be an elderly Hamlet figure - 'Alas poor Yorick', and so on -but to me it became about other things too. Touchstone is handing over cynicism and disillusionment to the only other character in the play who exhibits them, whilst he paddles off into the sunset for a bit of idealized wedded bliss with Audrey. It's also a way of saying: 'Sod off you grumpy old git!' One student that I spoke to had another opinion; she said: 'Well every- one else is getting married off and having fun - it gives Jaques someone to talk to.'
We've been playing the production now for about eight months and we've done around one hundred performances. As I write this we are about two months into our run in London with another four months ahead of us and around forty-live performances still to do. The production continues to develop and move on and I'm still discovering new ways of playing scenes or more effective ways of saying lines. The ghosts of RSC past still come to visit but they feel slightly more benevolent now; these parts have been being re-interpreted for four hundred years and will continue to be so for as long as there is theatre. I can't hope to do any of it definitively, just 'my' way, and when I realized that I was very liberated. I've never performed any part this many times and yet I'm nowhere near to getting bored yet - but that's usually a sign of good writing. I've tried to be as loyal to Shakespeare's words as possible rather than trying to embellish them with a let of comic business - like I've said I can't do all that anyway - and I've been really delighted with how much audiences have actually laughed, not tittered knowingly at their own knowledge of what a 'peascod' is or how many Elizabethan double entendres they can count, but because the situations and the words are genuinely funny. I'm not an obvious choice to play the part and I was terrified at the prospect but I've gradually discovered that Shakespeare's clowns are funny . . . and I never thought I'd say that ten months ago.
DAVID TENNANT
David Tennant played Touchstone in Steven Pimlott's production of As You Like It at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1996 and at the Barbican Theatre later that year and into 1997. It was his first season with the RSC and his other roles were Hamilton in The General from America and Jack Lane in The Herbal Bed. His earlier stage work had included a wide range of classical and modern roles in seasons at the Manchester Royal Exchange, the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, and elsewhere, as well as at the Royal National Theatre. He has also worked extensively on radio and television.
'I hear Roy Kinnear was marvellous . . .'
I auditioned for Orlando. I knew As You Like It from seeing it at school (but I didn't remember much about that) and, of course, I had read it at drama school but it wasn't one of the plays that I was particularly familiar with. I knew it was broadly about some woman dressing up as a bloke with some 'hey-nonny-no' type songs and a famous speech in the middle.
I was in the thick of rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie up in Dundee when the call came to get to London for an RSC audition, giving me woefully little time to prepare. I picked the brains of the people twas working with to get a bit more of an idea what I was going up for. 'Basically', the collective conclusion was, 'it's a play about a woman who dresses up as a bloke with some "hey-nonny-no" type songs and a famous speech in the middle . . . oh, and there's a clown called Touchstone in it, the usual confusing Shakespearian jokes - thankless part.' I remembered Touchstone from reading the play. It struck me as the sort of part I'd be useless at, stuffed with endless 'routines' and thick with references which had lost any contemporaneousness about three hundred years ago. However, I didn't need to worry about that, they'd find some brilliant comic to play that part and he'd fill it with plenty of hilarious business that would bring it bang up to date. I had to concern myself with Orlando - not an easy part in itself but at least I could approach it fairly conventionally. I could look at who the character was, what he wanted, what his through-line was and so on. I flew down to London the next day, cribbing furiously. I'd skim-read the play the night before and now I was concentrating on each of Orlando's scenes in turn. It was a very tricky part, at once full of bullish machismo, then suddenly prancing through the trees in the depths of romantic gooey-ness, but by the time I arrived at the Barbican I had it all figured out (I thought) and I strolled in ready to thrill Steven Pimlott (the director) with my brilliant, intelligent and - dare I say - revelatory take on one of Shakespeare's trickiest lovers.
'I'd like you to have a read of a bit of Touchstone' was Mr Pimlott's opening statement. I was sure I'd misheard.
'Sorry?'
'Touchstone . . . I'd like you to read a bit of Touchstone.'
Steven flashed me a large, open smile. If this was some audition tactic to disarm me, I was indeed duly disarmed.
'But . . . em . . .' - stay calm I told myself - 'I was to audition for Orlando.'
'Well, yes, but I'd like to hear a bit of Touchstone.'
'OK' I replied, trying (and failing) with all my Scottish Presbyterian stoicism to sound like I thought it was a great idea. 'Fine. What would you like to look at?' We read a couple of scenes through. It was all I could do to pronounce some of it let alone fill it with charm or vivacity. I didn't understand most of it and as for being funny . . .
I was back on the plane that evening feeling very sorry for myself, nursing a bruised ego and smarting as the dream of an RSC season slipped away. So to say I was surprised two days later when my agent rang to say I'd been offered the part of Touchstone is the understatement of all time. Of course I accepted without thinking. It was a main part in a Shakespeare play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon- Avon, not something I could consider turning down; but over the next two weeks before we started work on it I began seriously to doubt my own sanity.
To start with I re-read the play. It struck me how episodic it all is, how many different stories are going on at the same time and yet how little actually happens. It seemed different to any other Shakespeare play I had read with a pace and charm and quirkiness which I imagined would be hard to get the measure of. It has one monster part (Rosalind the heroine/hero) and a very full and varied supporting cast each of whom seems to fulfil a very definite role. Orlando is the lover, Celia the friend, Duke Frederick the bad guy, Jaques the contrast, Silvius and Phebe the complimentary sub-plot, and Touchstone the comedian. Ay, there's the rub. I could see that Touchstone was supposed to be funny in terms of the structure of the play, the tone of his scenes, and the fact that everyone keeps going on about how hilarious he is. Jaques in particular, an otherwise miserable sod, when confronted with Touchstone, finds his 'lungs began to crow like Chanticleer' (II.vii.3o) and yet I could find nothing in the part to make me even smile. Through the rest of the play I found a lot of genuinely funny exchanges. Rosalind was very witty, Celia sported a fine line in caustic sarcasm and Jaques's melancholy cynicism gave him some wonderful put-downs, but all Touchstone seemed to have was long speeches heavy with obscure double entendres and long tracts of cool philosophy, but nothing obviously funny. I couldn't imagine many Chanticleer-like lungs were going to be found in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in the coming summer.
The next morning I bought myself a copy of the Arden study notes on As You Like It (I liked the appropriateness of the publisher) as well as two more editions of the play and I began the slow process of finding a way into this character. It's not a huge part, just seven scenes of which three or four are little more than sketches which Shakespeare seems to use to puncture the action now and again with a breath of silliness. Unlike Feste in Twelfth Night or even the fool in King Lear, he does have his own bit of plot line in his relationship with Audrey, but quite what the nature of that is is far from clear. Does he love and want to marry her or does he just want to get his leg over? He seems uncertain himself and changes his mind from scene to scene, even from line to line -but more of that later.
All too soon it was our first day of rehearsal and . . . the read-through. Always a terrifying experience when you speak your lines out loud in front of people for the first time, a read-through at the Royal Shakespeare Company is particularly scary, not only because you are at the home of 'world class classical theatre' (as all the brochures tell you) with all the history and influence of hundreds of great, definitive productions hanging in the air, but also because it's one of the few theatre companies in the country that can afford to employ the numbers of actors required to stage a full scale Shakespearian production, so the room is full of people! I sat in my place in the huge circle of chairs with palms sweating and heart racing. Everybody else in the room seemed to attack their parts with intelligence and ability. Niamh Cusack playing Rosalind was graceful and calm and the verse seemed to pour off her tongue; Rachel Joyce as Celia spoke the words like they were her own, not four hundred years old at all; Liam Cunningham gave Orlando a vigour and a believability (and I instantly understood why it shouldn't be my part). As my first cue approached I took a deep breath and hoped for the best. Feeling very small and hopeless I just gabbled Touchstone out as quickly as possible, fully expecting to be sacked at any moment and of course . . . nobody found any of it the least bit funny.
Before we began rehearsal proper Steven Pimlott and stalked through our initial thoughts and impressions of what Touchstone was all about. Court jesters or fools fall into two categories: the clowns and the naturals, the former being professional comedians employed to entertain by virtue of their comic talent and the latter being local simpletons or village idiots who would find themselves dressed up and kept around to be laughed at by the court.
We decided almost immediately that Touchstone was no natural. His wit was too logical, too satirical to be accidental. He was evidently very learned and he appears very much Rosalind and Celia's intellectual equal rather than some poor gormless idiot whom they take pity on. Although Celia calls him a 'natural' early on ('Nature . . . hath sent this natural for our whetstone' (I.ii.3I-2) ) that is almost certainly a term of gentle abuse rather than a statement of actuality Therefore as a professional jester Touchstone is, quite literally, living on his wits. The life of a parodist or satirist in the retinue of a recently established usurping monarch cannot be an easy one.
Dictatorships are notoriously suspicious of entertainers, especially ones who comment on current affairs, however humorously, and yet that is one of the traditional roles that a court jester would fulfil. So at the start of the play Touchstone must be treading a fine line: he must make Duke Frederick laugh - and indeed he seems to do just that: 'the roynish clown at whom so oft/Your grace was wont to laugh' (II.ii.8-9) - but he must also prod at the bubble of this fragile new government without bursting it and being silenced forever by a paranoid new authority.
Bearing all that in mind makes Touchstone's escape to Arden with Rosalind and Celia both understandable and inevitable. But it is only later when Touchstone severs all his links with the court by (temporarily) leaving Rosalind and Celia that he can enjoy his own journey. As long as he's 'one of the girls' keeping the princesses company and making them laugh he can never really grow up, but once he's set free in the forest he experiences a sort of crude 'rite of passage' with Audrey as the catalyst. In Arden he can enjoy all the liberties of humanity denied him by his position at court. Of course he is drawn back to court life by the end of the play but he's grown up and he's in love . . . well lust at least! His horizons have expanded. But how should he be played? Steven and I talked through a few ideas. He should certainly be mercurial and chameleon-like; he'd need to be. To survive in Frederick's court he'd have to be all things to all men, responding to each situation appropriately to keep his head (quite literally). Perhaps he'd even have a collection of characters and voices that he could slip in and out of; and that could easily spill over into the way he relates to Corin or Audrey or William in the forest. There should certainly be some sort of play-acting going on in front of Corin and Audrey to whom he is telling, no doubt, all manner of lies about his pedigree. As Jaques notes at the end: 'he hath been a courtier, he swears' (v.iv.41).
There is also the problem about how to make sense of those long passages of text where Touchstone 'goes off on one' and strings long chains of thoughts and witticisms together out of thin air. We needed to create a character who liked the sound of his own voice and the buzz of his own brain. Even outside the court when presumably he wasn't being paid to be 'witty' any longer he persists in playing with words and twisting ideas around. His exchange with Corin in Act Three, Scene Two is full of convoluted lateral thinking and the encounter with William (v.i) is verbal diarrhoea on a grand scale. It struck me that he was like a manic depressive who suffered periods of melancholia - when Jaques reports his encounter with Touchstone (II.vii) the 'motley fool' sounds far from happy - before bouncing through periods of mild mania. The flights of ideas, the energy of thought and the inability to shut up are all traits of manic episodes in a hi-polar mental illness. It is perhaps an actor's affectation to think of Shakespearian characterization in this way, but it helped me to make sense of some of Touchstone's less easily motivated moments. A heightened libido can also be symptomatic of mania which certainly feeds into Touchstone's attachment to Audrey!
In terms of how the character would look, the decision had already been taken by Steven, who was keen that I should be dressed in a traditional fool's outfit. That was fine by me. There are so many references in the text to the 'motley fool' that it would be problematic and unhelpful not to wear the chequered coat and with that comes the threepronged hat with bells on the end all in vibrant red, green and yellow. In a sense it would help to give the audience an immediate visual reference point as to what Touchstone was in this world and anyway I've always liked long coats so I'd feel very happy in it - whatever the colours. In the end our designer, Ashley Martin-Davis, came up with a very striking and stylish outfit which seemed perfect to me. If Touchstone had to wear the fool's uniform he's enough of a snob to make sure he cut a dash in it.
And so, with another deep breath, we began rehearsal proper. My first session was on Act One, Scene Two, my first scene (obviously enough). Steven's way of working begins with a good couple of hours just reading through the scene and discussing what is going on. Niamh Cusack, Rachel Joyce and I were keen that there should be a real 'girls' changing room' feeling to this scene between Touchstone and the princesses. Of course I felt immediately defeated by Touchstone's first exchange. All that stuff about pancakes and mustard - not exactly opening on a sure-fire laugh. Steven was keen that we should concentrate on the situation. Touchstone is being sent to fetch Celia to her father - not his job. He's being used and abused by Duke Frederick, probably to the delight of the other courtiers, which will deeply disgruntle the proud Touchstone. Steven also encouraged me to think the 'certain knight' that swore 'by his honour they were good pancakes and swore by his honour the mustard was naught' (I.ii.6I-3) was actually Duke Frederick himself, which added an extra dynamic to the scene as I was being rude about Celia's father, That way the scene began to take shape with the three chums having a bit of a falling out because Touchstone is so annoyed with the Duke. It also helped feed into the story of the play itself with Celia being forced to examine her loyalties - does she side with her increasingly disenfranchised friends or with her increasingly alienating father? - and it shows Touchstone's disenchantment and grumpiness about the state he finds himself in. Then the trio can be united again seconds later as they all take great delight in ridiculing Monsieur Le Beau.
My initial problem was that I felt a great presume to come on and be funny! I was the comic after all, but the whole pancakes/mustard section simply doesn't work as purely a comic turn: it isn't funny enough for a start and the language is so opaque so early on in the play that a modern audience is going to find it very hard to listen to such an odd argument. With something else to play it freed me up to concentrate on what I was saying and why I was saying it. This all sounds ludicrously obvious as I write it now. Of course actors need to be thinking of the situation and motivation for what they are saying, but these famous Shakespearian roles can come with a lot of baggage attached. A lot of people seemed very keen to tell me how hilarious Roy Kinnear had been as Touchstone; how memorable Patrick Wymark; how scene-stealing Kenneth Branagh; or Griff Rhys Jones in the movie version; how only a few years ago on the RST stage Mark Williams had received such glowing reviews in the part. I hadn't seen any of them (I'm sure they were all brilliant) but in my mind they hung like immoveable monuments to great comic acting and to a wee boy frae Paisley coming to the Royal Shakespeare Company for the first time they were spectres that proved hard to banish. Of course the only way to exorcise these ghosts is to do your own version of this new part as you would any other, to approach it as you would a new part in a new play, but I could feel the finger of history tapping on my inexperienced shoulder and the pressure was: 'be funny or sink!'
Meanwhile back in rehearsal Steven was hammering away at the text, picking us up on each mixed emphasis and every ignored alliteration point and slowly the ancient, often unwieldy language was beginning to come to life and make sense. It was very early on that we decided I should use my own accent in the part. He's very much a 'one-off' character within the world of the play so why shouldn't he have a 'one-off' accent? And besides, if we were going to explore the idea of using different voices then I'd be in a much better position if I started from my own. It seemed perfectly logical to me - I never ceased to be amazed in the coming months how much attention that particular decision received. I think people thought I was making some great comment on the serfdom of a nation or something; it was simply me giving myself one less thing to worry about!
By the time we came to rehearse Touchstone's next scene (II.iv), the escape to Arden, Steven's vision of the play was beginning to come into focus. He'd been keen to allow things to develop slowly. (The longer rehearsal processes afforded at the RSC allow actors and directors a little more freedom than elsewhere, where deadlines and design requirements mean a lot of fundamental decisions have to be made before rehearsals even begin, sometimes before a full cast has been assembled.) Steven had decided that we should be costumed fairly traditionally and in a basically neutral set, but other ideas were evolving gradually as we all reacted to the play day by day. As far as Arden was concerned, Steven was coming round to the idea that it should be a far from welcoming place, nothing like the Utopia that Rosalind and Celia think they're heading for. So we came onstage in the midst of a snowstorm. This allowed me to play to the hilt Touchstone's self-righteous indignation at being dragged along (even if underneath it all he's quite glad to be away from the court) . So a line like 'Ay, now am I in Arden, the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place, but travellers must be content' (II.iv.13-15) can positively drip with sarcasm.
My biggest problem in this scene, and it's one that I've never really come to terms with, is that if Touchstone is genuinely miserable and disconsolate and unhelpful then where does one find the springboard to launch into the whole 'Jane Smile' routine on line 42? Steven suggested that Touchstone is taking it upon himself to cheer the princesses up but that doesn't seem to be in keeping with the grumpy complainer of only a few lines before. It also lands you with the earlier problem of trying to do a 'turn' and very little else. As a speech it is crammed full of double entendre: 'I broke my sword upon a stone and bid him take that for coming a-night to Jane Smile' (II.iv..43-4) and obscure references like 'batler' and 'peascod' so there is a fairly technical exercise to be done in merely trying to help an audience follow all the things one is trying to communicate as well as trying to key in to the rest of what's going on. In the end I went for the idea that Silvius's pining for Phebe has triggered a genuine memory in Touchstone which he then relives as he retells it - fondly at first as he remembers Jane, and even with a smile: 'I remember the kissing of her batler and the cow's dugs that her pretty chopt hands had milked', then bemusement 'I remember the wooing of a peascod instead of her', even reliving the tearful frustration of saying ' "Wear these for my sake'' ' before snapping out of his reverie to evaluate how ludicrous it all is: 'We that are true lovers run into strange capers' (II.iv.44-5o). And that, I suppose, is the purpose of the speech - to illuminate the ludicrousness of being in love so that the whole thing is also being used by Touchstone as a message to the absent Silvius and, more particularly, to Rosalind, warning them off all this romantic nonsense. I still don't feel entirely happy with how it works. I'll probably be sitting in the bath in three years' time and I'll scream 'that's how I should have done that bit!' but for now I tinker away with it every night trying to make it fit its corners into a still round hole.
It's only really after this scene that Touchstone comes into his own as he begins to enjoy his country life. In our production the weather changes and Arden becomes a much more magical, welcoming place. The long exchange with Corin, the shepherd, in Act Three, Scene Two seemed impenetrable at first. Steven was keen to see a battle of wits between the two, like a pair of music hall turns trying to outdo each other. The old pro coming up against the young pretender, if you like, as the countryside meets the court. Of course Touchstone thinks he'll walk away with it, but Corin is much more of a match for him than he'd anticipated. I started work on the scene by trying to throw everything at it. Touchstone became a spinning top chucking off silly voices, silly walks, even acrobatics to try and inject some life into what appeared to me to be a long, wordy and dry argument. Of course what I was doing was running scared of the words and not trusting Shakespeare. I was taken in hand by Cicely Berry, the RSC'S world famous voice expert and all round guru who has an almost supernatural gift for sniffing out what actors need to help them find a way into something. She took Arthur Cox (playing Corin) and myself and stripped all the fireworks away and just made us investigate the arguments. I just listened to the brilliantly lucid Arthur and responded to what he said, the arguments began to make sense and the sparring between the two characters became very real. Steven brought us right down stage and sat us with our feet hanging over the front of the thrust so the whole scene began as a very low key chat (as Steven put it, an after dinner stroll through the woods with two chaps content in each other's company) until Touchstone starts to show off: 'In respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught' (III.ii.14-15) and so on, then throws it over to Corin. 'Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?' (line 21) only to find that the simple countryman is more than a match for him. As we play the scene Arthur's Corin remains splendidly solid and unflappable, arching the occasional eyebrow at Touchstone's excesses. In our production, at least whilst Touchstone has the last word, it is Corin who wins the battle. The only silly voice that remains is a dash of Ian Paisley on 'Then thou art damned' (line 33). I'm afraid I couldn't resist it!
Following this exchange comes Touchstone's last scene with Rosalind. Early on in rehearsal Niamh and I cooked up all manner of elaborate ideas about their relationship; that the reason Touchstone ridicules Orlando's poems is due to his jealousy that Rosalind should be falling in love with someone else. Absolute rubbish of course: we tried it for a while but we were playing a subtext that simply didn't exist. The scene is more about Touchstone enjoying taking advantage of the fact that he can ridicule Rosalind and Orlando's affair whilst Rosalind is impotent to stop him, being dressed as the boy Ganymede in the presence of Corin. One nice touch that developed at the end of the scene was that I had a handful of poems torn off the trees and on the line 'You have said, but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge' (III.ii.117) I tossed them into the audience. Initially it was just a device to get them off the stage but it actually seems to ask the audience to act as jury on it all and to evaluate all these different versions of 'love' that are about to pass before them.
From there to the end of the play Touchstone is concerned with wooing the shepherdess Audrey. Susanna Elliott-Knight is a brilliant Audrey and we both toiled long and hard together trying to make sense of their relationship. Does Audrey love Touchstone or does she just like the idea of marrying a rich bloke? Does Touchstone love Audrey or does he just want to get his leg over at any cost? The fact is that Touchstone seems to have no clear idea of what he's after from one moment to the next. Certainly in their first scene together he tells Jaques that the vicar Oliver Martext: 'is not like to marry me well; and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife' (III.iii.82-4), so this is not looking like someone ready to make a lifelong commitment, but then the very next time we see the 'happy' couple and Audrey is complaining that Martext would have done the job well enough, Touch stone calls him: 'A most wicked Sir Oliver, Audrey, a most vile Martext' (v.i.5-6) and proceeds to make a great deal of fuss at seeing off Audrey's previous boyfriend William when he comes to 'lay claim' to her.
I found the only way to deal with Touchstone's apparent contradictions through these last few scenes was to stop striving for the logical through-line and to play each moment as it arrives. After all, the evolution of any human relationship is far from linear and playing all the contradictions actually helps to make their courtship more believable in my opinion. I don't think Touchstone is ever convinced that he wants to get married until Hymen casts her spell in the final scene and his indecision is spirited away.
In the first half of Act Five Touchstone and Audrey have two short scenes, sketches really, that add virtually nothing to the (admittedly slender) plot. Act Five, Scene One is really just an elaborate set-up: Touchstone comes on and shows off in front of Audrey's boyfriend, Audrey's boyfriend is decidely unimpressed, Touchstone is crushed and Audrey sorts it all out; and Act Five, Scene Three is just an excuse for a song. In Shakespeare's day it would have given his comic a chance to do his turn and keep the groundlings happy, like a bit of music hall variety really. The cleverer we tried to be about it the harder it seemed to become.
Act Five, Scene One is rather like a Monty Python sketch. I adopted a Terry Thomas-esque accent and the props department supplied me with a walking stick version of the traditional jester's stick so that Touchstone transforms himself into a medieval 'hooray Henry'. He is in his element throwing questions and witticisms at the simple William and as the scene goes on his fervour grows so that by the time he gets to: 'He, sir, that must marry this woman' (v.i.45) he is positively flying. We played the rest of the scene with William (Simcon Defoe) watching impassively as Touchstone's mania mounted so that by 'I will o'er-run thee with policy; I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways' (line 54) I was dancing around him, shrieking and threatening him with my walking stick, and with 'therefore tremble and depart' I was screaming in his face. Simeon coolly grabbed me by the shoulder and floored me with a headbutt for a good bit of (hopefully) amusing bathos.
For most of rehearsal Act Five, Scene Three had been reworked and edited down so that we dispensed with the two singing pages and Touchstone and Audrey sang the song straight out front as a piece of pure music hall. I found it very useful to have that sort of upfront opportunity to develop a relationship with the audience but Steven decided after a few weeks that it clashed with the overall style of the production and put a spoke in the rhythm of the play, so with a week or so of rehearsal left we went back to the script and two of the actors playing foresters (Nathaniel Duncan and Simon Westwood) were roped into the scene as the two singing pages. Ultimately, it seemed the correct decision to play the scene as written and by keeping it within the world of the play it allows the relationship with Audrey to develop a bit further. As the pages sang Audrey started to dance around, embarrassing Touchstone in front of these courtier-singers, but then she came over and started flirting with him until he lost all self-control and as the song came to an end the couple were rolling around the stage together. The cynical Touchstone has been dragged kicking and screaming in to living in the moment as the pages sing: 'And therefore take the present time . . . For love is crowned with the prime.'
So the couple make their way into the final scene and the wedding. The whole sequence where Touchstone meets Duke Senior and goes through the seven degrees of an argument is a bit of a tricky section to be met with at the end of a long play. It isn't Shakespeare's finest comic writing, several commentators have noted how it looks as if it was written fairly hurriedly, probably at a dress rehearsal when the company realized that the two boys playing Rosalind and Celia would need some time to get out of their disguises and into their wedding finery. Again I felt this terrific pressure to 'be funny' - instant death to any comic invention. There is no plot to be moved on, it's simply a delay to the happy ending. I resisted the overwhelming temptation to panic and tried to find a simple way through the scene. It is, of course, an audition.
Touchstone, with his new-found wife to support, will need a court to jest in, so the discovery of a benevolent Duke in the forest is an opportunity he can't miss out on. Jaques acts as his feed, introducing him and prompting him to go in to one of his routines. We played on this on the line 'I have had four quarrels, and like to have fought one' (v.iv.45) with Touchstone madly signalling to Jaques out of sight of the Duke until he tumbled what Touchstone was getting at and gave him his cue - 'and how was that ta'en up?' - allowing Touchstone to launch into his party piece on 'the Lie Direct' (whilst excusing his prospective bride as 'an ill favoured thing, sir, but mine own') I resisted the temptation to smother the 'Seven Degrees' speech with comic business or vocal gymnastics, firstly because I can't really do all that anyway and secondly because the speech is quite hard to listen to and I felt that if an audience were distracted by any gimmickry it would probably only help to make it sound like so much gibberish. So I concentrated, again with the invaluable help of Cicely Berry and Barbara Houseman of the RSC'S voice department, on making it as intelligible as possible. I tried to give each of the seven degrees a different attitude and an increasing level of seriousness as the argument hots up. Jaques became the courtier in the story as I told it to the Duke advancing toward Jaques on each 'degree' then referring back to the Duke to explain what was happening: 'this is called the Reply Churlish' etc. By the time I reached the Lie Direct I was right by Jaques and it was very stern and full of portent; then with Jaques's next line 'and how oft did you say his beard was not well cut' I would let it all drop to a cowardly dismissal of the whole thing 'I durst go no further than the Lie Circumstantial, nor he durst not give me the Lie Direct. And so we measured swords and parted' (lines 82-4) .
The next speech is the final thing that Touchstone says in the whole play and it's a perfect example of his convoluted, lateral-thinking logic. After listing the seven degrees again he says: 'All these you may avoid but the Lie Direct; and you may avoid that too, with an "If ''. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thoughtful of an "If": as, "If you said so, then I said so'' and they shook hands and swore brothers. Your "If" is the only peace-maker; much virtue in "If ''' (v.iv.93-100) . I always feel a great sense of achievement when the audience laughs at this bit because it means they've followed the circuitous arguments to the end and tuned in to Touchstone's bizarre way of thinking - and because they are genuinely responding to fourhundred- year-old jokes!
The play's ending is very difficult with Hymen appearing as a fairly crude deus ex machina to sellotape all these dodgy marriages together. It's hard to make something like that believable for a modern audience and in our production in Stratford Steven took the very bold step of having Hymen as an older woman entering the stage from the auditorium dressed as a member of the audience in modern-day clothes. It was certainly a disorientating moment for the audience and it proved a very controversial decision. With hindsight it probably didn't entirely work (indeed for the London run Hymen was transformed into an Elizabethan elemental figure who arrived through the back wall of the set) but Steven's intention was very valid: he wanted to emulate the shock of what it would actually be like for a god to appear to these characters and really to play with the frontiers of reality like that. It seems to me that Hymen must be a supernatural creature rather than Corin or another character in disguise as some directors have chosen to play it, because she does some fairly supernatural things to these couples; I can't believe Silvius and Phebe would ever get together otherwise and as for Celia and Oliver being 'heart to heart' - they've only just met and Oliver was a total bastard half an hour previously!
One of the last pieces of interpretation in our production comes when Touchstone presents Jaques with a skull just before he heads off to be rid of all the jollity at the new court. A lot of people have asked me why it happens and in truth I can't entirely enlighten them. Steven asked me to do it very early on in rehearsal: he had an idea about showing Jaques to be an elderly Hamlet figure - 'Alas poor Yorick', and so on -but to me it became about other things too. Touchstone is handing over cynicism and disillusionment to the only other character in the play who exhibits them, whilst he paddles off into the sunset for a bit of idealized wedded bliss with Audrey. It's also a way of saying: 'Sod off you grumpy old git!' One student that I spoke to had another opinion; she said: 'Well every- one else is getting married off and having fun - it gives Jaques someone to talk to.'
We've been playing the production now for about eight months and we've done around one hundred performances. As I write this we are about two months into our run in London with another four months ahead of us and around forty-live performances still to do. The production continues to develop and move on and I'm still discovering new ways of playing scenes or more effective ways of saying lines. The ghosts of RSC past still come to visit but they feel slightly more benevolent now; these parts have been being re-interpreted for four hundred years and will continue to be so for as long as there is theatre. I can't hope to do any of it definitively, just 'my' way, and when I realized that I was very liberated. I've never performed any part this many times and yet I'm nowhere near to getting bored yet - but that's usually a sign of good writing. I've tried to be as loyal to Shakespeare's words as possible rather than trying to embellish them with a let of comic business - like I've said I can't do all that anyway - and I've been really delighted with how much audiences have actually laughed, not tittered knowingly at their own knowledge of what a 'peascod' is or how many Elizabethan double entendres they can count, but because the situations and the words are genuinely funny. I'm not an obvious choice to play the part and I was terrified at the prospect but I've gradually discovered that Shakespeare's clowns are funny . . . and I never thought I'd say that ten months ago.
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Hamlet
Hamlet
Author: Abigail Rokison a
| Affiliation: | a Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK |
DOI: 10.1080/17450910903138062
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
David Tennant played the title role in Gregoty Doran's production of Hamlet at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon from 24th July to 15th November 2008 and for some performances at the Novello Theatre, London in December to January 2008-9. In this interview Tennant discusses the process of production from casting to performance - his initial thoughts on the part, rehearsal preparation, character interpretation and realization. Situating Doran's production within the performance history of the play, Tennant discusses the reasons behind their modern-dress interpretation and the relevance of the play to a twenty-first century audience.
Abigail Rokison: What was the process by which you came to be playing Hamlet?
David Tennant: Two things sort of happened at once. I, for many years, have known Tara Hull who produces for the RSC. I saw her socially, and I'd been doing TV a lot, and the conversation turned to what I might do next, and I said, “What I would really love to do is to go back and do a couple of shows at the RSC; in an ideal world I suppose I would do Hamlet and either Berowne or Benedick.” This was a social conversation that she then mentioned at some RSC producers' meeting, at pretty much the same time that Greg Doran was thinking that it might be an idea to do Hamlet. He also tells the story - I don't know how apocryphal it is, but it's a good story - that when I did the BBC Who Do You Think You Are? show, and went to the Isle of Mull, tracing my ancestors, I went to a small church where they were having some renovation done and had taken up the floorboards and discovered some skulls, and I picked a skull up and looked at it, and Greg claims that when he saw me do that he thought - “Ah, he's auditioning for Hamlet, what a good idea.” So I'm not sure in what order the two events happened, but there was a meeting of the moons. Greg called me up and said, “What do you think?”, and at that time I didn't know exactly what I was doing in terms of working on Dr Who. But then the production schedule for Dr Who presented itself in such a way that there was going to be this gap, so I went to Greg and said, “This might be a possibility.” It was going to be quite tight with the two shows - getting them up and running and getting them to London - so there was a bit of to- and fro-ing and talking about how things might work out. But Greg had some strong ideas already. The first time we met he said, “Patrick Stewart's desperate to play Claudius so it would be good if we could work that in.”
AR: You'd worked with Greg before hadn't you?
DT: Yes, years ago on a double bill of The Real Inspector Hound and Black Comedy in the West End, but never on Shakespeare, which is his great love. So I knew Greg and liked him very much and knew that Shakespeare was something that he had a huge talent and passion for, and I wanted to work at the RSC again. Lots of things just slotted into place, and when the schedules tied in and it presented itself I thought that I really couldn't resist any longer. And then, of course, it goes from something that you have just talked about to something you have to do.
AR: What were your feelings about the part, and indeed the play, before you began rehearsals? I remember you saying that you were terrified.
DT: Yes, I was terrified. But the terror is part of what makes it such an attractive prospect, because it's Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is where you would want to play Hamlet if you're going to do it. That's exciting, but it's also immediately terrifying because it sets you against all those people who have done it there before. Greg loves to talk about the unbroken line of Hamlet performances that have been passed down through the generations. It's thrilling to think that you are a part of this, but at the same time, it only serves to make you more scared.
AR: Were there any performances that you had seen that had particularly stuck in your mind?
DT: Yes. I think that the first time I saw the play performed on stage was Mark Rylance in the RSC's production of 1989. I'd seen it at school on video when we studied it for Higher [Higher Grade, exams taken by schoolchildren in Scotland around the age of 15-16], but I'd never seen it on stage before. That was such an extraordinary performance. I remember seeing it and realizing that Shakespeare could be modern and conversational and anarchic and inspirational in a way that it hadn't been for me up until that moment. So that performance was inspiring and intimidating in equal measure. I have, of course, seen lots of performances since then, all of which have had something about them. That is the one mitigating factor I think, that it is the sort of part that although you connect more with some performances than others, there is always something about it. To an extent, although it's a huge test it is also pretty much actor-proof. Whatever you throw at it will illuminate something.
AR: Mark Rylance's Hamlet has been talked about as the genuinely mad Hamlet, Jonathan Pryce's was the possessed Hamlet, David Warner's was the student prince. Is there any pressure to make your mark as a particular type of Hamlet?
DT: It's funny. Although people talk about Mark Rylance's Hamlet in those terms, that's not how I remember it. I suppose there is a temptation, and you have to guard against finding yourself trying to define your version, to look for the gimmick - or worse for the critics' strap-line - when you're rehearsing. As soon as you get self-consciously idiosyncratic, you might as well go home. I'm sure that Mark Rylance wasn't in rehearsals thinking, “I'm going to do the mad Hamlet.” I'm sure that he just responded to the play as he went along. Having seen it and not read about it - which I think is interesting because performances become defined by what is written down about them - having seen that production twice because it meant a lot to me, I would never describe it as the “mad” Hamlet. For me he was terribly real - not that madness isn't real - but he was terribly connected, and the language made beautiful sense and was very conversational in many ways. If anything, he didn't carry his princeliness with him; he showed Hamlet to be a normal, flawed human being.
AR: Having decided to take on the part, what preparation did you do in advance of rehearsals?
DT: Short of reading the play, I didn't do much. I did the obvious thing of going through the text trying to make sure that I understood what it all meant, making sense of any archaic words. Beyond that I tried not to do too much. There is so much that you can read, but I didn't want to start reading about how other people had done it and the choices that they had made, partly because I knew that that is what Greg does - Greg reads every performance history and every anecdotal report on every production that has ever been, and that informs and helps him I think - but I didn't want to be continually setting myself against what had gone before. The role should exist as something that is being performed as if for the first time or it's not relevant. I also wanted not to terrify myself with expectation, or confuse myself with notions of what had been judged in the past to be good or bad.
AR: You didn't learn any lines before rehearsals began?
DT: No I didn't. I started learning lines the first night after the first day of rehearsals and I gave myself a schedule to keep to, so that purely in practical terms I would know it all by the first night, but I didn't want to start learning lines before I started. As soon as you start learning lines, however much you strive against it, you make psychological decisions about how they link up.
AR: And then it is difficult to unlearn them.
DT: Absolutely. And that's not to say that things don't evolve or change through rehearsal and even during performance, but it is just inevitable that once you start committing things to memory your brain remembers them as part of an emotional journey. So I tried to wait until the last moment to learn them.
AR: How long was the rehearsal process and how was the time used?
DT: I think that we were about two weeks around the table at the start of rehearsals, going through the text line by line. We had a cut text to begin with. I think that Greg had cut around 25% of the lines.
AR: How long did it run at in the end?
DT: Three and a half hours, including the interval. I think that uncut it's about four and a half, isn't it?
AR: It depends which text you use.
DT: Quite, and indeed how you do it, of course. Greg was quite free with the texts as to where he took bits from.
AR: You moved act 3 scene 1 to its place in the First Quarto. Was that a decision made before rehearsals started?
DT: No, that wasn't done before rehearsals. That was a decision made quite far in. One of the glorious things about the RSC is that you get six or seven weeks of rehearsals. We were presented with the cut text, and we were encouraged to bring any more cuts, but not reinsertions, I think quite rightly because otherwise things can get out of control. Actors can love some little line that they found in the fourteenth quarto hidden under the settee and can make convincing defences about why it doesn't work for them if that line's not in. It did happen a couple of times, but I was up for streamlining it as much as possible. If I think back now, I think that he had probably cut about 20% and was looking to cut about 25% and things did come and go a bit. For the first two weeks you work around the table and Greg keeps you away from your own part. You're not allowed to comment on or read your own part. You work round the table with each person taking roles in turn and playing that character for a few pages. After they read out the line it is then discussed, interpreted and debated. It is quite a fastidious process, but totally invaluable. If you happen to be next when your part comes around then you miss that round, and as your lines are being discussed and interpreted by the table you're not allowed to comment. Some people try to break that rule. It can be quite frustrating if you get a room full of people agreeing that your line definitely means something particular, and you are thinking “It really doesn't!”, but you just have to sit on your hands and allow these other ideas to percolate, and sometimes an idea that you think you have can be challenged.
AR: Presumably this is also useful in creating a sense of ensemble.
DT: That's the fantastic thing as well. At the end of those two weeks, we read through the play in our own parts for the first time, and even in the white terror of that moment, speaking these lines out loud in front of people for the first time -. But even from within my own terror I remember thinking that it felt as though we all knew what we were talking about already and that we had a group ownership of the play. It goes without saying, I hope, that as you are working round the table like that there is absolutely no hierarchy. Someone who is playing Fourth Player has as much right to debate as the person playing Hamlet, or even the director. You've got such a range of experience around that table. Some people have been doing Shakespeare for fifty years, and others have never done it before in their lives, and this range of experience gives you a range of reactions to the text and an idea of how different audience members might receive it as well.
AR: It also seems to me to be important because there is a sense that at the RSC at the moment there is Michael Boyd's idea of the long-term ensemble (two or three years) with little or no hierarchy, being set slightly against the short-run productions with a couple of big names, and yet it sounds as though the process was as ensemble as it possibly could have been given that someone is playing the Fourth Player and someone else is playing Hamlet.
DT: I think that's right. Of course, that company did do three plays - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost - and many of the actors had already done A Midsummer Night's Dream, so it already felt like a company when I turned up. Myself, Patrick Stewart, Oliver Ford Davies and Penny Downie all showed up for Hamlet. Oliver and myself then went on to do Love's Labour's Lost and Nina Sosanya joined then. So 60% of the company were in three plays and about 80% of the company were in at least two. To an extent there was a hierarchy of casting within that, in that I was playing two quite major roles, some people were playing one larger role and one smaller. It is also about how you set the room out and what the process is. I would hope that everyone in Hamlet felt that the play belonged to them and that no one felt as if they were playing a supporting role to the production. That's certainly how rehearsals felt to me.
AR: So, you did a couple of weeks of working around the table, and then you had the read through. The RSC is known for having voice and textual classes. Was that all part of the rehearsal process?
DT: We were rehearsing in Stratford because Midsummer Night's Dream had already opened. A lot of the cast were rehearsing Hamlet during the day and then doing a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream at night. Being in Stratford we had the benefit of Lyn Darnley and Cis Berry. Cis was great. She comes and goes whenever she can. I saw a lot of Cis on Hamlet and Love's Labour's and it was just glorious. She was more involved in these two productions than any of the previous times I've been at the RSC. Lyn Darnley is just brilliant and because I hadn't been on stage for a while I did a session a day with Lyn. That sense of support helped to keep me vaguely calm. All those resources you have at the RSC are just invaluable.
AR: How did your conception of the character and his place in the play change during rehearsals? You say that you had tried not to do too much preliminary work.
DT: I tried to be as blank as possible at the beginning, although inevitably you do come with ideas. Even if you read a play once you have preconceptions and notions about it. It's hard to be specific about things, because things are so gradual, and also talking about it now at the end of a run, it's quite difficult to work out where you were at the beginning, especially with a play like this that changes from night to night. I do remember being surprised, because I had always assumed that Hamlet and his father had a slightly distant relationship, that his father was a slightly distant patrician, quite a bellicose figure with whom Hamlet didn't really identify. But whilst I do think that they are very different, I remember that once we actually started playing those scenes, there was a sense of the bond that they had and a sense of that paternal connection, and I was quite taken aback by that.
AR: After seeing your father's ghost, as part of your oath to him you made a decision to cut your hand, which had resonances both of self-harm and of stigmata. What was the impulse for this decision?
DT: A decision is made at this point to move forward, to fight the fight and to avenge. The idea was that the hand would act as a reminder - a blood oath. There is definitely something of the self-conscious martyr about him: “Yes I will cut myself.” It never quite connects with him on an emotional level, the idea of carrying anything through, but he gets very whipped up by the idea of it and by making grand gestures, both to himself and to the world. It was partly the sense of fevered excitement that actually there is a way forward. I think that at the beginning in “O that this too too solid flesh would melt”, there is the feeling that I am trapped and there is nowhere to go, that I am on my own and that the world has gone mad and I'm the only sane person left and I'm bereft. Suddenly I am given a lifeline - not only is there someone to avenge, but there is something to fight against and to validate that anger. There is a great joy in being able to stand up and say, “This is my oath to myself and I will remember when I look at that and I'm tattooing this on myself so that I can't forget.” Maybe he already knows that he will find it easy to forget.
AR: We have, from the Olivier film, the idea that “this is a story of a man who could not make up his mind”. This comes partly I think from the trajectory of the First Folio and Second Quarto texts, notably in the placement of “To be or not to be”. Moving this speech and the whole “nunnery scene” to the place that it is in the First Quarto gives Hamlet a very different journey.
DT: Absolutely. We had just got the play up on its feet, and we had sort of staged it, so around the end of the third/beginning of the fourth week, every time I had read the play that point always felt like a “trip”. Of course there is something interesting from an acting point of view about a character who seems certain and then changes his mind and drifts away again, but it goes against the drama of the story-telling, I think. That's not to suggest that it is wrong, and of course, what Shakespeare intended we will never know - it seems that he intended different things at different times. The fact that there were the two versions meant that we allowed ourselves to consider both, and quite quickly both Greg and I and most of the company felt that it was better. Also, you have this issue that the play is so well known and so well worn, how do you create any dramatic tension? You've got to be telling a story, rather than just presenting some well-known scenes strung together. It does strike me as a thriller, and with the more traditionally accepted texts, the Players' scene coming where it does stops it being a thriller, it stops the forward momentum. Whereas if you do it with “To be or not to be” in its location in the First Quarto, it just seems to make more sense. It suddenly became clear to me and to Greg that that made sense, that he would see his father on the battlements, he would get fired up, would go back to his room wanting to share this with someone and couldn't and his head was exploding and he didn't know what to do with himself, and he went to bed and had a sleepless night where he started doubting everything that had just happened and realized that the world he was living in was even worse than he had dreamt it was, speaks “To be or not to be” thinking “What am I going to do?”, and then suddenly the Players arrive and he can see a way out, and you go straight from that into “The Mousetrap”. It made more sense, and it made it more linear. Because we were talking about it as a thriller all the time and talking about keeping it fresh, and because we were also looking for ways to subvert expectations - not that it's not been done before many times, but we were always looking for opportunities to be a bit free with it. We tried it one day and we never looked back. Going out of “The play's the thing” straight into the play - I think it's quite hard to argue against it.
AR: It certainly makes Hamlet more of a Revenge hero.
DT: Yes, because it's not the story of a man who can't make up his mind, it's about a man who keeps making his mind up and becomes full of energy and certainty and then hits brick walls here and there. At the start of the play he is so lost and exhausted and when he sees a crack in his prison's walls he just leaps at it.
AR: I suppose it means that other characters or circumstances create your obstacles, rather than you creating them for yourself. In both the moment in which you catch Claudius praying and the moment at which you stab out at what you think is the king behind the arras, if the situation had been slightly different, you'd have murdered him.
DT: Absolutely, and we wanted to keep pushing the idea that he might, which is why we put the interval where we did, in the middle of 3.3. That was one of Greg's first ideas and I loved it. To put the interval in the middle of “Now might I do it pat”.
AR: Was that a choice made during rehearsals?
DT: Greg had always had it as an idea, and we talked about it and thought, “That's quite cheeky and quite bold, but it might just work.” I think that we ran each act before we ran each half, so it was actually quite late in rehearsals when we tried it, but again, everyone just loved it. There was a collective decision in the room that that was the kind of production that we were wanting to do. If you have never seen Hamlet before you should believe that he is going to plunge the knife into his back. Or even if you have seen it before, you might just for a second go, “Is he …?”. It is about creating these little moments where the audience doubt that they know it and that is what we were very keen to do.
AR: Presumably you were always aware that due to your popularity as Dr Who you were likely to attract quite a young audience who maybe hadn't seen the play before but were coming in order to see you.
DT: It wasn't a conscious thing for me. I think other people were more aware of that than I was, because lots of people have mentioned it. I don't know how much that was in Greg's head. He certainly didn't share that with me if that was his thinking. I think that it was just part of a natural instinct that Greg and I share, and Patrick certainly shares, and most of the cast to an extent probably share, that if we are going to tell these stories again, let's tell them as though they have never been told before. It's always going to be the case that there are people in the audience who haven't seen the play before. It might have been more so with this production because there were Star Trek fans and Dr Who fans. I don't know, but it certainly wasn't why we did it. Any play should be exciting to watch, especially something like Hamlet that is a thriller, a ghost story. I think that it is quite easy to forget that when you are in Stratford doing Shakespeare's works.
AR: Within this structure of the play on which you decided, how did you then see the trajectory of Hamlet's madness? Did you see Hamlet as really mad, or deliberately assuming an “antic disposition” or does the assumption of the “antic disposition” start to send him mad?
DT: Well, he's not going to know, is what I thought. Any human being does things from moment to moment, and Hamlet won't be making decisions about whether he is mad or not, because if you are mad you don't believe you are, so I think you just have to play each scene and see what each scene gives you. Whether or not he is mad is for the audience or a doctor to decide, it's certainly not for Hamlet to decide. What is madness anyway? Where does madness end and sanity begin? So I just played each scene and tried to make emotional sense within the context of what we were doing.
AR: How did you conceive the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia? Did you, for example, discuss any background to their relationship - what it had been like before the play starts?
DT: Yes we did. Obviously there's the scene that she describes to her Dad. I think that if circumstances were different then they could have been together. I mean, he has been away at University, so they haven't seen each other for quite a long time, and you wonder what has been going on for him emotionally and sexually whilst he is away. You also wonder what has been going on for him emotionally and sexually whilst he is at home with Ophelia. In my head they were a couple who spent a lot of time together and relied on each other when he was at home. It is ultimately far more distressing if there was an intimacy between them that is suddenly gone. We struggled with getting the “nunnery scene” to make sense. I couldn't quite see past the idea that when she appears he's not just going to want to curl up in a ball and have his head stroked. We tried to pursue that for a long time and it just wasn't working. You're trying to extrapolate the whole relationship from that brief period of time that they spend together on stage. The assistant director - one day when we were getting tied up in knots trying to work out how they could be intimate, and she said something about the fact that Hamlet can't be intimate with Ophelia, that he mustn't be because he is working quite hard at maintaining a certain way of being and keeping up the act that he is putting on and if someone gets inside that then it will fall apart. So as soon as we started that scene with him saying “Oh fuck, she's here and I can't look at her because as soon as I look at her it's all over,” which implies that the relationship has been intimate but can't be any longer, then it seemed to work.
AR: Did you have a particular moment when you realized that Claudius and Polonius were there watching, like “Where's your father”?
DT: Yes we did, and at that point. We did struggle with that, and I don't think that we ever quite solved that. It's very tricky. We had a sound cue where something happened - Polonius dropped a book - and in that moment Hamlet realizes what is going on and that he has been betrayed. It's tricky finding that switch, and there is nothing in the text that really helps you. It did work dramatically, but looking back on it now it does rather feel that we just shoved something in to shape the action around that isn't in the text.
AR: It is fairly firmly embedded in the performance history for the recognition to happen at that moment.
DT: Right, well Greg probably knew that. That was certainly the scene that we struggled with most. A lot of scenes seemed to work - I don't know what word to use other than the pretentious actorly “organically”. We just talked about them and played them and they found their own rhythm and journey, but that was the one that we struggled with. But once it opened up it felt great and it joined the journeys together. The structure of “To be or not to be” into that and then into the “Fishmonger” scene does seem to work. I saw it that he had been up all night, and in “To die, to sleep,” does he really want to die or does he just want to be able to sleep? I know that feeling - I would quite happily die rather than being awake any longer. All of that confusion carries through into the arrival of the players, which creates a lightbulb. When we cracked that scene then that whole long passage - it becomes one extended scene in one location - seemed to become fluid.
AR: What about the relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude? You made the decision, for example, to make use of a bed during act 3 scene 4. Was that a decision that was talked about with regard to the question of whether their relationship is Oedipal?
DT: I don't really remember any discussions. Clearly there is another room where Claudius sleeps, but they might well have separate bedrooms. In my head it's her bedroom because that's what we did and it never felt as though it should be anywhere else.
AR: I am not convinced that an Oedipal relationship is implied in the text, but again that is a strong part of the performance history of Hamlet.
DT: I'm not either. I'm not quite sure where that's come from. I don't really see where he wants to fuck her. It's certainly not something that we discussed. We certainly never rehearsed the scene without a bed, so it must have been a decision made early on, but that decision wasn't made with any sense of a sexual relationship between them. I don't even remember it coming up in the two weeks of talking about the play line by line around the table. I think that there's a lot of sexual stuff going on, but that is about “I can't bear the thought that you are a sexual being and are fucking my uncle, who is a shit, when my father has just died.” I don't think that the thought of being repulsed by your parent's sexuality is the same thought as wanting to have sex with them. I think that that is what it is about, it is a repulsion at the thought of his mother having sex, and how dare she? How dare she not be my mother any more?
AR: Moving on to the theatre itself. Having performed in the RST, what was it like playing in the Courtyard Theatre, which seems to encourage, and even demand an intimate audience/actor relationship, and what was it like subsequently moving to a proscenium arch stage in the West End?
DT: The Courtyard is completely different from the RST but very like the Swan. It just felt like a bigger version of the Swan, which I was very happy with. There are certain problems about from where you can address the whole of the audience. It was very important to me that the soliloquies were directed straight to the audience, and when you are in a space like that it's quite hard not to address them to the audience. I like the fact that you can actually see the people sitting there, that you are not just talking into a void. I really liked it, and even though it is a big old room it felt very intimate. It feels very involving and inspiring. I thought that I would hate moving to a pros. arch in the West End, but the Novello is such a beautifully designed theatre, that nobody feels very far away. Vocally the Novello took a lot less, which I was amazed about. The Courtyard has a bit of an echoey metal thing going on, and acoustically there are areas in the Courtyard that trap the sound. I know this from having voice sessions in there with the company and trying out sitting in different seats. There are some seats that are difficult to reach. You are either shouting too loud or not speaking loudly enough. On the whole, however, the Courtyard is great, and I can't wait to see the new RST which will be based on that model, but with all the slight problems that the Courtyard has ironed out, allegedly.
AR: Can you talk a bit about the set design? The use of mirrors, for example.
DT: The mirrors were a season decision. They were used through the three plays. I don't know where it started as an idea. Obviously there are lines like “hold the mirror up to nature” and it is a surveillance society which fits well with the idea of the two-way mirror. I think that Greg will admit that the idea for smashing the mirror led back to the idea of how that could be a gun shot, so there was horse/cart thing - could we make that work? We had to find reasons why, for example, Gertrude would have a gun in her bedside table, and she might well, when you think of how that man broke into the Queen's bedroom a few years ago. It all felt OK as a means of enabling that theatricality and ultimately it felt part of our world and it was such a great image, once we had worked out how to do it. It's always great to have those things, as long as you are careful that they don't start leading the production.
AR: You say that you didn't particularly think about the fact that you might get a young audience for the play, but when you talk about making the play “speak” to your audience and telling them the story as if for the first time were those some of the motivating factors for setting the play in the present day?
DT: When Greg and I first talked about it, that was what we talked about. I prefer it, I'll be honest, so I was very happy and encouraged that thinking. I think that the whole doublet and hose thing is, not insurmountable, but it is a barrier to connecting with a modern-day audience. Again, you have to be careful that you are not allowing it to get in the way. Our production was modern-day but it wasn't too specific. We didn't go for mobile phones and Blackberries and fax machines. If you keep it non-specific enough it allows the audience to watch and see people that they recognize, rather than seeing people from another time. Particularly if you are trying to present a something with which you want people to connect and for it to be exciting and thrilling and emotional, it is just easier to connect if they look like people look like now. So, it was always the intention. Just as it was, conversely, always the intention with Love's Labour's Lost that it would be the full Elizabethan chocolate box, because that is the kind of play that it is. It is a box of posh chocolates, whereas Hamlet is … I can't continue the analogy … Hamlet is a whole dinner.
AR: So you set it present day but made an effort not to be too specific. In rehearsals, or indeed in performance, did things come up which enabled you to see strong resonances between the world of twelfth-century Denmark and that of twenty-first century Britain?
DT: The whole idea of Polonius as this spymaster general and it being a surveillance society made a lot of sense because we live in a surveillance society. We are constantly monitored and people are constantly watching each other. Politically it also makes sense - Claudius is just another corrupt politician. And emotionally it is very modern - the whole idea that although it is set in this God-fearing world where the existence of God is pretty much accepted, Hamlet is coming up with these huge doubts. What is interesting about that is that one moment he seems to be fearing Heaven and Hell and the next he is doubting their very existence and the fact that we are anything other than a puff of dust. I think that that is quite a modern sensibility and is quite surprising when you think about the world that he is in. It makes you wonder whether the Elizabethans were quite as godly as we are led to believe.
AR: I think that the Elizabethans were unsettled, living as they did in a society where there had been shifts from Catholicism to Protestantism and the two religions had different conceptions of the afterlife.
DT: Sure. Obviously you have got the whole purgatory idea and yet he then talks about “the undiscovered country”. He contradicts himself, and at times seems like an atheist. But people do that, and that is quite modern. There were very few moments that didn't feel comfortable in the modern setting. There were some practical issues to address - if you mention a sword do you have to have a sword? But the guards might have ceremonial swords so that's fine and that got us through a couple of moments. You can change the word sword to blade without anyone really noticing and then it's a flick knife and who cares. We debated sometimes whether we should do something like that to stop the audience worrying. I had a flick knife and said “up blade” rather than “up sword”, just so that in the end people aren't going, “Is it a sword?”.
AR: In a way Baz Luhrmann has created a means by which that can be accepted - by having guns with the trade name “sword”.
DT: Yes, but he can have a close up.
AR: But now that he has done that it has opened up the possibility and maybe allows others not to have to “explain” those moments.
DT: Greg is quite happy to change the odd word - we changed “arras” to “mirror” once. I'm very up for that. I think that there's a danger of bardolatry, and I can't believe that Shakespeare wouldn't have changed the odd word himself. I find it quite liberating. Patrick is surprisingly free with the text. He is all for changing words here and there for sense and I think it is a good policy. These plays are 400 years old, so there are going to be things that a modern audience can't understand. We are very respectful of the Shakespearean text, much more so than we are of the work of most other writers. I think that the rule of thumb is that you don't want to fiddle with it so that people notice that you've fiddled, but if you stop an audience going for just one second, “Oh, he said arras and that isn't an arras, it's a mirror” then it keeps them in the story.
AR: Talking about how words get changed to fit the stage scenario, I was wondering how old you saw Hamlet as being, because of course in the Second Quarto and First Folio he is about thirty, given that Yorick's skull has been in the earth for 23 years, but in the First Quarto he is about 18 - Yorick died only a dozen years before.
DT: I didn't know that. Is that what Trevor Nunn used then?
AR: Well, I think partly the idea that he is a student and partly the references to “young Hamlet”.
DT: Well, obviously I was thirty-seven, but I didn't want to spend the whole time worrying about that, and I certainly wasn't going to spend eight months playing eighteen because again you're creating a barrier that doesn't need to be there. I didn't give myself an age. It is suitably vague in the text. I've always thought that you can get away with Romeo till you're about thirty and you can get away with Hamlet till you're about forty. I suppose when I played Romeo at twenty-nine I was more aware that I was pushing it, and that is partly because Juliet's age is so specific, and they are children - not that Hamlet is much of an adult - but generationally they feel like children. I never really thought about it with Hamlet. It never bothered me. I just thought, “He's whatever age you think I am right now.” I can't think how it would have changed anything if I had thought, “He's twenty-nine” or “He's thirty-nine.”
AR: No, I think it is only relevant in the more extreme choice of whether he is more eighteen or more thirty.
DT: He's certainly not a grown-up in lots of ways. He becomes more of a grown-up as the play goes on.
AR: Did you have an idea of the period of time over which the play takes place?
DT: It's very vague and very difficult to pin down. I remember that we talked about it a bit and elected not to focus on it, which again didn't bother me. I stopped thinking about it. I increasingly find that you can make so many decisions about character that they actually inhibit what you are doing. Especially during a long run, any given moment can change from one night to the next, and you can end up restricting yourself by making definite decisions.
AR: I suppose it is also the case that the way in which Hamlet perceives time in the play is sometimes warped, because his father's death seems so fresh in his mind, for example in the moment when he says “My father died within's two hours” and Ophelia says “Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord.”
DT: He can't believe that the court has moved on. Clearly in his head it is recent and present and that is what matters as opposed to the number of days.
AR: Finally, in terms of the run as a whole, did the play change a lot?
DT: I'm sure that it did, but it is quite hard to be objective about it. Some things changed nightly, whilst others remained amazingly consistent. It would be amazing to watch a video of the first night and the last night. How you felt about different characters changed - you'd fall in and out of love with Ophelia, you'd care for Gertrude more or less, be more of a friend to Horatio and at other times more self-centred. That is what happens when you do anything for any length of time. I had, of course, this back operation in the middle of it and had to miss some time and when you go into hospital because part of your frame stops working you do feel terribly vulnerable and terribly mortal, so I think that I probably felt more fragile when I came back at the end, because physically I was, but also, those thoughts about mortality were running through my head. We're almost certainly going to do a film of it in a month or so, so it will be interesting to see what it is like coming back and how it affects it taking it to a different medium.